Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Today's topic: Lyme disease.

PS-- Lezlee and I are visiting Adam-ondi-Ahman today. Limited computer contact for another two weeks about.

In about a week, I'll give a fireside here in Northern Missouri on "Newton's religious views."

By Dr. Mercola

Unrelenting pain. Headaches, muscle aches, swollen joints, rashes. Loss of coordination and muscle spasms. Intermittent paralysis. Cycles of disabling symptoms that persist for years, causing ceaseless suffering and frustration for patients and their families.

This is the picture of chronic Lyme disease. And yet, many physicians tell their patients there is "no such thing," referring them to psychiatrists, misdiagnosing them, or even accusing them of fabricating an illness or simply seeking attention.

An award-winning documentary called "Under Our Skin" exposes the hidden story of Lyme disease, one of the most serious and controversial epidemics of our time.

Each year, thousands go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, often told their symptoms are all in their heads. This film brings into focus a troubling picture of a health care system that is far too willing to put profits ahead of patients.

The History and Discovery of Lyme Disease

Lyme disease rates are escalating at breakneck speed, among humans as well as animals. Today, Lyme disease the most common vector borne disease in the U.S., far more common and dangerous to the average American than West Nile virus. In fact, there were almost 40,000 reported cases of Lyme in 2009,1 which by all accounts is a gross underestimate.

The CDC estimates the real number of cases may be up to 12 times higher, suggesting as high as 480,000, making Lyme far more prevalent than AIDS. The number of Lyme cases reported annually has increased nearly 25-fold since national surveillance began in 1982.2

Lyme disease was named after the East Coast town of Lyme, Connecticut, where the disease was first identified in 1975.3 The disease was first referred to as "Lyme arthritis" due to the presentation of atypical arthritic symptoms. By 1977, the black-legged tick (Ixodes scapularis, also known as the deer tick) was linked to transmission of the disease.

Then in 1982, Willy Burgdorfer, PhD, discovered the bacterium responsible for the infection: Borrelia burgdorferi. The bacteria are released into your blood from the infected tick, while the tick is drinking your blood.

We now know there are five subspecies of Borrelia burgdorferi, more than 100 strains in the U.S. and 300 worldwide, many of which have developed resistance to our various antibiotics. Although many still attribute transmission exclusively to ticks, according to Dr. Deitrich Klinghardt, one of the leading authorities on Lyme disease, the bacteria can also be spread by other insects, including mosquitoes, spiders, fleas, and mites. This may be the reason so few Lyme sufferers recall being bitten by a tick.

Borrelia burgdorferi is a spirochete,4 a cousin to the spirochete bacterium that causes syphilis. In fact, they look very similar under a microscope. B. burgdorferi's corkscrew-shaped form allows it to burrow into and hide in a variety of your body's tissues, which is why it causes such wide-ranging multisystem involvement.

The Invisible Illness

Many Lyme patients who battle this disease on a daily basis appear healthy, which is why Lyme disease has been called "the invisible illness." They often "look good," and their blood work appears normal, but their internal experience is a far different story. Patients struggling with Lyme disease usually become adept at hiding their pain from others as a way to cope and restore some degree of normalcy to their lives.

Part of the problem with diagnosing and treating Lyme disease is that it is so easy to misdiagnose.

Lyme disease is called "the great imitator,"5 mimicking other disorders such as multiple sclerosis (MS), arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, ALS, ADHD and Alzheimer's disease. In some cases, Lyme patients can even develop paralysis or slip into a coma. The only distinctive hallmark unique to Lyme disease is the "bulls eye" rash, but this is absent in nearly half of those infected. Laboratory tests are notoriously unreliable.

Fewer than half of Lyme patients recall a tick bite. In some studies, this number is as low as 15 percent. So, if you don't recall seeing a tick on your body, that doesn't rule out the possibility of Lyme disease. According to TBDA:

"Although the bulls eye red rash is considered the classic sign to look for, it is not even the most common dermatologic manifestation of early Lyme infection. Atypical forms of this rash are seen far more commonly. It is important to know that the Erythema Migrans rash is a clear, unequivocal sign of Lyme disease..."

Besides the rash, some of the first symptoms of Lyme disease may include a flu-like condition with fever, chills, headache, stiff neck, achiness and fatigue. For a complete list of symptoms, refer to the Tick-Borne Disease Alliance6 (TBDA), but some of the more frequent symptoms include the following:

Muscle and joint pain
Neurological problems
Heart involvement
Vision and hearing problems
Migraines

The "Lyme Paradox"

Dr. Klinghardt believes one of the factors that's led to increased Borrelia virulence is the dramatic increase in electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and microwave radiation from cell phones and towers, wireless Internet, power lines, household electrical wiring, etc. Reduction of exposure to these fields is a key part of his Lyme treatment protocol, which I'll be discussing shortly.

One of the reasons blood tests are so unreliable as indicators of Lyme infection is that the spirochete has found a way to infect your white blood cells. Lab tests rely on the normal function of these cells to produce the antibodies they measure.

If your white cells are infected, they don't respond to an infection appropriately. And the worse your Borrelia infection is, the less likely it will show up on a blood test. In order for Lyme tests to be useful, you have to be treated first. Once your immune system begins to respond normally, only then will the antibodies show up. This is called the "Lyme Paradox" – treatment before diagnosis.

Dr. MacDonald's Syphilis Model

The behavior of Borrelia may be more similar to its cousin Treponemapallidum, the spirochete responsible for syphilis. Both take different forms in your body (cystic forms, granular forms, and cell wall deficient forms), depending on what conditions they need to accommodate. This clever maneuvering helps them to hide and survive.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for Borrelia as a far greater player than previously thought comes from the work of Alan MacDonald, MD, who's been studying parallels between Lyme disease and syphilis for the past 30 years. MacDonald found the DNA of Borrelia in seven out of ten brain specimens from people who died of Alzheimer's disease.7

Astonishingly, the DNA was "fused" with human DNA, into one molecule! Syphilis is well known for causing symptoms across multiple body systems, including neurosyphilis, the psychiatric form of the illness.

Syphilis remains relatively easy to treat, as long as it's diagnosed early. But its cousin Borrelia seems to be upping the ante. Dr. Klinghardt stated in one of our interviews that he's never had a single patient with Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis who tested negative for Borrelia. Those are all diseases with no known cause. Could Lyme disease be the missing link? And if it is, why hasn't there been a stampede of researchers in pursuit of the truth?

Attorney General Finds IDSA Lyme Guidelines Flawed and Panel Corrupted

A handful of people are the gatekeepers for information about Lyme disease. Most of those occupy positions within the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), which publishes guidelines for a number of infectious diseases, one of which is Lyme.

The IDSA's most recent clinical practice guidelines for Lyme disease8 they claim Lyme is easily cured with, typically, two weeks of antibiotics, requiring 28 days in rare cases. They also claim there is no scientific evidence for chronic Borrelia infection. However, the literature choices they list in their reference section clearly reflect their bias. Of the 400 references they cite, half are based on articles written by their own people.

Their literature review in no way represents the total body of science related to the study of Lyme disease.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal has long been a strong advocate for people with Lyme disease.9 While he was Connecticut, Attorney General Blumenthal conducted an investigation into the IDSA's panel members and 2006 Lyme disease guidelines.

These guidelines have sweeping impacts on Lyme disease medical care. They are commonly applied by insurance companies to restrict coverage for long-term treatment and strongly influence physicians' treatment decisions. Insurance companies have denied coverage for long-term treatment, citing these guidelines as justification that chronic Lyme disease is a myth. Blumenthal's investigation found conflicts of interest were rampant in the IDSA, with numerous undisclosed financial interests among its most powerful panelists.

The IDSA agreed to create a new panel to review the ethics of the 2006 IDSA panel, overseen by Blumenthal's office. But this ended up being nothing more than a pacifier. The end result was a Final Report published on the IDSA site10 finding the original guidelines "based on the highest-quality medical/scientific evidence available," stating the authors "did not fail to consider or cite any relevant data." Senator Blumenthal continues to fight the establishment, however, and has taken his battle to the Senate.

Other Resources

The International Lyme and Associated Disease Society (ILADS) is by far the best and most responsible group.The following are some other resources you might find helpful:

Turn the Corner Foundation
Tick-Borne Disease Alliance (TBDA)
Lyme Diseases Association, Inc.
Leading Lyme disease expert Joseph J. Burrascano, MD, wrote what is essentially a manual for managing Lyme disease, entitled "Advanced Topics in Lyme Disease," which is worth adding to your resource files. Realize that his treatment focus is long-term antibiotics, which I believe should not be your first choice. Nevertheless, there is some good information in this publication.

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Buttered Popcorn Flavoring Linked to Alzheimer’s
October 18 2012 | 33,448 views |

By Dr. Mercola

If you like to snack on the occasional bag of microwave popcorn, it's probably the buttery flavoring that you crave.

This comes from an artificial flavoring called diacetyl, which is a natural byproduct of fermentation found in butter, beer and vinegar... and also a chemical made synthetically by food companies because it gives foods that irresistible buttery flavor and aroma.

Many companies who manufacture microwave popcorn have already stopped using the synthetic diacetyl because it's been linked to lung damage in people who work in their factories.

But now a new study at the University of Minnesota shows that diacetyl is not only a risk to workers' lungs... it may also pose a risk to your brain.

Microwave Popcorn Chemical Linked to Alzheimer's Disease

Researchers conducting test-tube studies revealed that diacetyl has several concerning properties for brain health. Not only can it pass through the blood-brain barrier, which is intended to help keep toxins out of your brain, but it can also cause brain proteins to misfold into the Alzheimer's-linked form known as beta amyloid. It also inhibits mechanisms that help to naturally clear the dangerous beta amyloid from your brain.1

It's not known at this time whether eating diacetyl-containing foods (it's used not only in microwave popcorn but also in other snack foods, baked goods, pet foods, some fast foods and other food products) increases your risk of Alzheimer's, but the finding that it may contribute to brain plaques linked to Alzheimer's at very low concentrations is concerning, to say the least.

How many other synthetic chemicals have we been told are perfectly safe, only to find out over time that they aren't. MSG and aspartame come to mind... but there are countless others as well.

Removing Diacetyl from Microwave Popcorn Doesn't Make it Safe...

As mentioned, diacetyl is known to cause serious, sometimes life-threating respiratory illness in microwave popcorn-plant and flavoring plant workers. Many companies therefore began to stop using the chemical in their products, replacing it with another ingredient called 2,3-pentanedione (PD), which is also used to impart a buttery flavor and aroma.

Now researchers have revealed that PD, too, can lead to respiratory toxicity similar to that caused by diacetyl.2 The chemical was also capable of pathologically altering the gene expression in rat brains, leading to neurotoxicity. The study's lead researcher noted:

"Our study is a reminder that a chemical with a long history of being eaten without any evidence of toxicity can still be an agent with respiratory toxicity when appropriate studies are conducted."

Not to mention, perfluoroalkyls (PFCs), which are chemicals used to keep grease from leaking through food wrappers, are widely used in microwave-popcorn packaging. These chemicals migrate into your food and are processed by your body, where they can disrupt your endocrine system and affect your sex hormones. PFCs have been linked to infertility, thyroid disease, cancer, immune system problems, and more.

Most US Corn is Genetically Modified

About 86 percent of all corn crops grown in the United States are genetically modified (GM), which brings a new set of health concerns to your microwave popcorn. Interestingly, none of the popcorn is genetically engineered, however just about all the other corn is, which is a great reason to avoid it. Additionally, as a grain it will typically not promote good health for most people.

So-called "Bt corn" is equipped with a gene from the soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which produces Bt-toxin – a pesticide that breaks open the stomach of certain insects and kills them. This pesticide-producing corn entered the food supply in the late 1990's, and over the past decade, the horror stories have started piling up.

Monsanto and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) swore that the toxin would only affect insects munching on the crop. The Bt-toxin, they claimed, would be completely destroyed in the human digestive system and would not have any impact on animals and humans.
The biotech companies have doggedly insisted that Bt-toxin doesn't bind or interact with the intestinal walls of mammals, and therefore humans.

However, the corn's Bt-toxin has been detected in the blood of pregnant women and their babies, as well as in non-pregnant women. Specifically, the toxin was identified in 93% of pregnant women, 80% of umbilical blood in their babies, and 67% of non-pregnant women tested.3 And there's plenty of evidence showing that the Bt-toxin produced in genetically modified Bt crops like corn is toxic to humans and mammals and triggers immune system responses. For example, in government-sponsored research in Italy, mice fed Monsanto's Bt corn showed a wide range of immune responses, such as:4

Elevated IgE and IgG antibodies, which are typically associated with allergies and infections
An increase in cytokines, which are associated with allergic and inflammatory responses. The specific cytokines (interleukins) that were found to be elevated are also higher in humans who suffer from a wide range of disorders, from arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease, to MS and cancer
Elevated T cells (gamma delta), which are increased in people with asthma, and in children with food allergies, juvenile arthritis, and connective tissue diseases.

Rats fed another of Monsanto's Bt corn varieties called MON 863, also experienced an activation of their immune systems, showing higher numbers of basophils, lymphocytes, and white blood cells.5 These can indicate possible allergies, infections, toxins, and various disease states including cancer. There were also signs of liver and kidney toxicity.

How is Popcorn Popped?

If you've ever wondered how a corn kernel turns into popcorn, the video above may give you a clue. A kernel of corn contains both moisture and oil, along with a hard, dense starch inside. As the kernel is heated, the moisture in the kernel gets turned into steam, which is held inside of the strong hull.

This turns the dense starch into a soft, pliable material, and as the steam continues to build pressure and heat, the hull ruptures suddenly and the starch expands into an airy foam that sets into the popcorn you're familiar with.

If you love popcorn and can't imagine giving it up, make your own at home using organic popping corn and coconut oil or butter. Place the oil or butter in a large pot, turn it on to medium heat and add your kernels. When the popping slows to one or two "pops" every few seconds, you're all done. Add your own natural seasonings like grass-fed, raw butter and Himalayan salt for a natural popcorn snack without all the artificial ingredients and chemicals that are inevitable with the microwave variety.

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Notes on Niacin and Vitamin B3!



By Dr. Mercola

As mass killings occur around the nation by obviously disturbed perpetrators at increasing frequency, there's plenty of blame to go around. The medical system gets blamed for not identifying these killers in time; the gun lobby gets blamed for fighting stricter gun regulations; and producers of violent video games along with incessant and glorified violence on TV certainly does nothing to combat despondency and desensitization.

But what if the solution could be found in one's diet, or in more extreme cases, in an inexpensive supplement bottle? Blogger Kimberly Hartke1 offers some ideas that are truly food for thought― and it's something that processed food manufacturers may not want to admit.

"What if our heavy reliance on processed and fast foods is leading to widespread nutrient imbalances?" she writes. "Dr. Weston A. Price, a researcher in the 1930′s found that primitive tribes eating a whole foods, natural diet high in animal foods and animal fat had no need for prisons. The moral character of these isolated people was strong. They were not incapacitated mentally or physically..."

One nutritional deficiency in particular that may have the potential to wreak havoc on your psyche is niacin (vitamin B3). Pellagra2 is a condition caused by niacin deficiency, and is clinically manifested by the 4 D' s:

Photosensitive dermatitis
Diarrhea
Dementia, and
Death

Pellagra's Violent Side Effects

The disease originates in your gut, with GI tract symptoms preceding dermatitis, and the condition is well known to be associated with malnourishment and the "poor man's diet" consisting primarily of corn products. Pellagra was epidemic in the American South during the early 1900's, and we just might be dealing with a similar epidemic of malnutrition today. A quote from the book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats reads:

"The clinical description of the typical poor Southerner, any time between about 1900 and 1940, comes alive in the novels of William Faulkner–the brooding sullenness, suddenly shattered by outbursts of irrational anger, persecution, mania, the feeling of people living in a cruel and demented world of their own…Doctors knew very well that diet was at the bottom of all the misery they saw around them, and that disease could be kept at bay by a balanced food supply…"

Hartke continues:

"... Barbara Stitt3, an author who once worked as a probation officer... found that changing the diet of ex-offenders eliminated the hostility and other symptoms that would lead them to act out in a criminal fashion. Her book is aptly titled, Food & Behavior: A Natural Connection and her work seems to confirm the findings of Dr. Weston A. Price on nutritional injury and the role it plays in juvenile delinquency and adult crimes.

A review of Barbara's book mentions her concern about reactive hypoglycemia, sub-clinical pellegra and vitamin B deficiencies being at the root of violent criminal's actions. Check out this revealing quote from the review4: "The startling part of sub-clinical pellagra, like hypoglycemia, is that the symptoms also mirror those of schizophrenia, a problem so widespread that those who suffer from it occupy one out of every four hospital beds in the United States."

Dr. Stitt's book also discusses other vitamin B deficiencies, such as B1, B2, B6 and B12—all of which have an uncanny ability to produce symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorders.


Credit: Food and Behavior by Barbara Stitt

Niacin as a Treatment for Schizophrenia

I recently interviewed Dr. Andrew W. Saul on the topic of niacin. Dr. Saul has over 35 years of experience in natural health education and is currently serving as editor-in-chief of the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. He's authored over 175 publications and 11 books, and has been named as one of the seven health pioneers by Psychology Today. He's also featured in the movie Food Matters, which I'm sure many of you have seen.

Dr. Saul is co-author of the excellent book, Niacin: The Real Story, along with one of the leading niacin researchers, Dr. Abram Hoffer. Niacin, Dr. Hoffer found, may indeed be a "secret" treatment for psychological disorders, including schizophrenia, which can be notoriously difficult to address.

"Dr. Hoffer is probably the world authority on therapeutic use of niacin. He started doing tests, studies, and research into niacin back in the early 1950s. And by 1954, Abram Hoffer had performed the first double-blind, placebo-controlled nutrition studies in the history of psychiatry," Dr. Saul says.

"Now, the early 50s were an odd time. Drugs were on the move; more were coming along. But they hadn't developed to the point where they are today, to put it mildly. Dr. Hoffer had a PhD in biochemistry, and he specialized in cereal biochemistry, which means the study of the vitamins and nutrients in grain. He was also a medical doctor. He was also a board-certified psychiatrist, and head of psychiatric research for one of the provinces in Canada... Dr. Hoffer observed that schizophrenia had symptoms that were very similar to those of pellagra.

Pellagra is extreme or total niacin deficiency. Pellagrins also – in addition to skin problems and many other things – have mental illness symptoms.

When vitamin B3 or niacin was first added as an enrichment or as a fortification to flour, about half of the people in mental institutions went home. This is not a well-known fact. They were there not because they were mentally ill – because of genetic, environment, or social reasons – but because they were malnourished... He wondered about the half that didn't go home.

What about the people that had a little bit of niacin, but didn't get better? ... [H]e started giving what at the time were preposterously high doses of niacin: 3,000 milligrams a day. And he was curing schizophrenia in 80 percent of the cases.

This is astonishing. The cure rate for schizophrenia with drug therapy is not particularly good. Dr. Hoffer saw again and again that niacin worked. Then he studied it, did the placebo-controlled, double-blind test, and started writing paper after paper on this. At that point, the American Psychiatric Association literally blacklisted him."

According to Dr. Saul, other researchers have since confirmed Dr. Hoffer's findings, and found that niacin can also be successfully used in the treatment of other mental disorders, such as:

Attention deficit disorder
General psychosis
Anxiety
Depression
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Bipolar disorder

Anger and Behavioral Issues "Miraculously" Solved with High-Dose Vitamin B3

Dr. Saul offers a powerful example of how niacin can help address violent behavioral problems and/or attention deficit disorders:

"I knew a neighbor who had a boy who was really, really in trouble – constantly in trouble at school, constantly in trouble at home. He was violent. This was really serious. This was more than ADHD. I'm calling it ADHD, because that's what the boy's doctors called it. But the fact is it was far beyond that. Nevertheless, they gave him one of the usual drugs for attention deficit disorder, and it made him worse.

So now he was even more violent and even more psychotic. The parents were in a state as you can imagine; the kid's only 13, everything's falling apart at home. They learned about Dr. Hoffer's niacin approach. And because it was a child, they figured, "Well, we'll start him at a lower level." They gave him 1,500 milligrams a day of niacinamide.

Now, niacinamide and niacin have the same psychiatric benefits. They both work. The difference is niacin will cause a flush in almost everyone who takes it in quantity, especially for the first couple of weeks...

... The parents noticed an immediate improvement. Within days, the child was less angry. He was less troubled at school. He was less oppositional. He was less violent. They immediately figured that if a little helped, maybe more would help more. They wouldn't know unless they tried, and they had no other options. Again, medication was making him worse not better.

They took him totally off of his medication, and they increased his niacin to ultimately about 5,000 milligrams a day. They even got the boy's psychiatrist to prescribe niacin, so he could take it at school. The school nurse was giving the boy niacinamide twice a day at school, as well as at home. All of a sudden, calls were coming from the teachers, saying, "The kid was just transformed. He was doing great." At home, everything was better.

This young teenager was taking nearly 5,000 milligrams a day of niacinamide. Now, this is an important caution for people thinking of doing this. Niacinamide has a disadvantage, and that is it's more likely to cause nausea at very high doses. And the boy did start experiencing nausea at around 5,000 milligrams a day. So, what they did was cut back the niacinamide quantity and started giving him more niacin. He got used to the flush. Then he was able to take the full high dose."

Niacin—Potentially the Best Therapy for Many Forms of Mental Illness

A key point Dr. Saul brings up in the full interview is that certain people have what Dr. Hoffer referred to as niacin dependency, meaning they need more niacin on a regular basis. Essentially, they're beyond deficient—they're dependent on high-doses of niacin in order to remain well. This particularly appears to be the case with mental disorders.

"Dr. Hoffer said that drug therapy alone has a cure rate of 10 percent. He added to that, "Drugs make a well person sick. How can drugs make a sick person well? "He saw this over and over and over and over again... Dr. Hoffer's experience was buttressed by Dr. Humphrey Osmond and a number of other researchers who have confirmed in practice that niacin is the best therapy for many forms of mental illness. And not only that, drug therapy is making people worse...

People would be better off – in many forms of mental illness – if they had no medication. But with niacin, we're not just negating, we're affirming. Niacin is a way that the person can tell within a few hours if it's going to help. If someone has anxiety, depression, psychosis, or schizophrenia, if they take high doses of niacin, they'll notice two things right away. The first is: they're going to flush like crazy. And the second is: they're going to feel better.

Now, as far as the "flush like crazy" thing goes, people are more concerned with the niacin flush than they need to be. But if you just can't contain the idea of having a niacin flush, take inositol hexaniacinate, and that will work just fine. Dr. Hoffer said, "The best cure for the niacin flush is more niacin." If you keep taking the niacin, the histamine flushes out of the body and the vasodilation stops. It takes, perhaps, a couple of weeks."

Vitamin B3 a Potential Weapon Against Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs

In related news, a new study5 suggests vitamin B3 may be able to combat superbugs that modern medicine is finding it harder and harder to fight, including antibiotic-resistance staph infections. The research showed that high doses of the vitamin boosted the immune system by 1,000 times, giving the researchers hope that they may have found a new―and possibly better―way to fight infection.

According to BBC News6:

"B3 increases the numbers and efficacy of neutrophils, white blood cells that can kill and eat harmful bugs. The study, in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, could lead to a "major change in treatment", a UK expert said."

One of the researchers is quoted as saying:

"This could give us a new way to treat Staph infections that can be deadly, and might be used in combination with current antibiotics. It's a way to tap into the power of the innate immune system and stimulate it to provide a more powerful and natural immune response."

More Information

Dr. Hoffer founded and produced the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine back in 1968. Its archives are online at orthomolecular.org, and they're free access. For more information about niacin, you can search Dr. Saul's website DoctorYourself.com.

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Notes on brain health!

By Dr. Mercola

One of my own recent interests has been brain plasticity - the ability of your brain to recover, repair, and regain functionality that had previously been lost. This idea conflicts with the conventional view that once you lose brain function, it's permanently lost.

Dr. Daniel Amen is a physician and board-certified psychiatrist. He's written five New York Times bestselling books, and is the medical director of the Amen Clinics in Newport Beach in San Francisco, California; Bellevue, Washington; Reston, Virginia; Atlanta, Georgia; and New York City.

He's also one of the foremost experts on brain imaging science, which is the topic of discussion in this interview. Brain plasticity features heavily in Dr. Amen's work with SPECT imaging.

"About 10 years ago, I wrote a book called Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. It's based on the imaging work that we've done," Dr. Amen says.

"We can actually see the damage in your brain done by a wide variety of things. But on what I call a brain-smart program, you can literally improve the function of your brain, which is happening through neuroplasticity. Your brain can actually look and feel younger, or look and feel more repaired. Very few people know that."

SPECT Imaging - An Invaluable New Tool for Psychiatry

That the human brain has a tremendous amount of 'plasticity' was demonstrated in one of Dr. Amen's studies on active and former NFL players. Football players may have been hit in the head upward of 10,000-20,000 times in their lifetime, and this results in a significant amount of brain damage for many. On Dr. Amen's program, 80 percent of them showed significant improvement, including boosting function and blood flow to the prefrontal cortex.

"We've had this rash of NFL suicides, which just breaks my heart, because what they don't know is that there is help available to them," Dr. Amen says.

Brain SPECT imaging is different from the anatomical MRI or CT scans. SPECT measures blood flow and activity patterns. It looks at how the brain works. It's similar to positron emission tomography (PET) scans, which looks at glucose metabolism. When using SPECT imaging, physicians look for three things:

Areas of your brain that work well
Areas of your brain that are low in activity, and
Areas of your brain that are high in activity

The job then becomes balancing the different areas of your brain. The Amen Clinics have performed over 74,000 scans on people from 90 different countries. Dr. Amen estimates they have more experience with this technology than anyone else in the world.

"It's very exciting," Dr. Amen says. "I often say psychiatrists are the only medical doctors that never look at the organ they treat. And when you never look at it, you miss brain trauma, you miss seizure activity, and you miss toxicity...

I'm a classically trained psychiatrist... I was taught to use psychotherapy and medications, and that's pretty much it. Some of the medications I was taught to use like Xanax, Ativan, or Valium for anxiety disorders, when I first started ordering SPECT scans, I saw that they made the brain look like [it had been exposed to] alcohol, and that they were really toxic to brain function. That horrified me, and it was the imaging work that led me to look for natural ways to decrease anxiety."

... When we make a diagnosis, for example of depression, it's a symptom. It shouldn't be a diagnosis. Making the diagnosis of depression, I tell people, is like making the diagnosis of chest pain. And doctors don't give people the diagnosis of chest pain, because it doesn't tell you what's causing it, and it doesn't tell you what to do it for. Depression is the same way.

If you don't get any physiological data on their brain, how would you target [the treatment] to their brain? It becomes – what's happening in psychiatry today – guesswork and multiple shots in the dark. I just argue with my colleagues that that's just not smart. We can do better."

Common Causes of Depression and Anxiety

Dr. Amen's work shows that most cases of depression and anxiety are really symptoms of underlying brain dysfunction. For example, depression can arise if brain activity is too low in your frontal lobes. This inactivity means you cannot inhibit your negative feelings. Depression can also be a symptom of heightened or excessive activity in your frontal lobes, as this leads to an inability to stop thinking the bad thoughts in your head.

A traumatic brain injury can also result in symptoms of depression. In fact, according to Dr. Amen, this is very common.

Other brain-related factors include toxic exposures, and/or a combination of poor lifestyle habits such as a poor diet and lack of exercise. Dr. Amen's treatments to optimize brain function focus on the four-pronged approach of diet, exercise, nutritional supplements, and correcting negative thought patterns.

How Brain Toxicity Alters Your Behavior

One of the major benefits of SPECT imaging is the ability to identify damage caused by toxic exposures. Dr. Amen explains just how significant such findings can be for the proper treatment:

"I had a patient recently who is diagnosed with ADD. He saw the best ADD doctor in the country. He made the diagnosis basically after 10 minutes of listening to his story. When we scanned him, he had a totally toxic-looking brain. Of course, you have ADD symptoms if you know there's damage to the front part of your brain. It turned out he had arsenic poisoning. He needed a detoxification program, not more Adderall."

He also describes a much more personal case where SPECT imaging turned out to be a veritable lifesaver. Four years into his SPECT imaging work, his sister-in-law called him about her then nine-year-old son, Andrew. The boy had attacked a little girl on the baseball field that day for no particular reason.

"I was horrified, and said, "What else is going on with Andrew?" She said, "Danny, he's different. He's mean. He's surly. I went into his room today, and I found two pictures he had drawn. One, he was hanging from a tree. The other one, he was shooting other children." I've been doing imaging long enough to go, "You need to bring him to see me." What we found was he had a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying the space of his left temporal lobe. It's an area we've subsequently really tagged to violent behavior. When they took out the cyst, his behavior went back to normal.

Still, sometimes when I tell the story, I'll cry, because I think about all the people we're throwing away like Andrew as "bad," when in fact, they may be sick.

Optimizing the brains of people who struggle, suffer, or even do bad things is not popular. But it's the right thing to do. If someone has problems with aggression, let's scan them and see if they've not had a brain injury. We actually uncovered 20 different brain cysts over the past 2 decades. I had a case last year of a teenage boy who wanted to cut his mother up into little pieces. He had a cyst the size of a tennis ball occupying the space of his left temporal and frontal lobe. We need to look at what we do before we start changing people's brains. It's logical... but the profession is very slow to change. I always argue that there's no downside to looking."

How Brain Dysfunction Can Cause Psychiatric Disorders

In his work, Dr. Amen has identified seven types of anxiety and depressions, six types of ADD, five types of overeaters, and six types of addicts. As an example, he reviews some common types of overeaters and the recommended treatment for them:

Compulsive overeaters, people who just can't stop thinking about food.

Here the front part of their brain works too hard. According to Dr. Amen, that is typically related to a deficit in the neurotransmitter serotonin. When serotonin levels go low (serotonin is, in large part, inhibitory to your brain), your brain starts to over-fire. To address this, Dr. Amen recommends intervention that boosts serotonin. While this can be done using one of the SSRI's – Prozac, Paxils, Zoloft, Lexapros, and Celexa - you can also boost your serotonin levels naturally, using 5-HTP, L-tryptophan, St. John's Wort, or saffron.

"There are multiple studies now with saffron, showing it has equal efficacy to antidepressants, and there are virtually no side effects to taking higher doses of saffron," Dr. Amen says. "A compulsive person leads us to a serotonin intervention. Exercise is also a serotonin intervention. It boosts serotonin in your brain. Head to head comparisons of exercise to Zoloft [show] they're equally effective at 12 weeks, but in 10 months exercise beats the socks off Zoloft."

Impulsive overeaters. Here, SPECT scans usually show low activity in the prefrontal cortex, indicating they cannot inhibit their behavior. They don't really think about food all the time, but as soon as they smell it, they feel the urge to eat. Low prefrontal cortex activity is generally associated with poor impulse control. It's also associated with attention-deficit disorder (ADD).

"Please don't put them on a serotonin drug or a serotonin intervention, because you'll lower their prefrontal cortex more and ultimately make them more impulsive," Dr. Amen warns. "That's why you have the research that came out in the early 90s about Prozac making you kill your mother. Well, in fact, it can disinhibit people, because of what it's doing in your brain. In impulsive people, we want to raise dopamine."

You can raise dopamine with drugs like Phentermine, an appetite suppressant, or Ritalin, Adderall, or similar stimulants. But you can also do it with green tea and with L-tyrosine. "We've actually seen Rhodiola do something very similar in the brain," Dr. Amen says.

Using Food as Medicine

Certain foods also raise serotonin, such as simple carbohydrates. This is another explanation for why you can become addicted to sugar, wheat, and pasta. According to Dr. Amen, carbohydrate foods such as sweet potato, brown rice, and oatmeal will also raise serotonin, but not in the same powerful way that will get you addicted, so clearly these are better options.

"A high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet is very good for impulsive people, because it helps them focus," Dr. Amen says. "But it's a disaster for our compulsive people, because they start to focus on the things that upset them."

Another dietary factor of great importance is probiotics, ideally in the form of traditionally fermented foods. According to Dr. Amen, as much as 95 percent of the serotonin in your body is produced in your gut, so strategies designed to optimize gut production of serotonin could certainly go a long way toward optimizing your mental health. I've become truly passionate about teaching people to massively increase the amount of fermented foods they're eating - specifically fermented vegetables, as these are some of the most palatable fermented foods for most people - to replenish the beneficial bacteria that produce serotonin.

Dr. Amen agrees:

"I've really been thinking a lot about gut health. Your gut is really the second brain. They're totally interconnected... If you have a leaky gut or an overgrowth of poor gut bacteria, you are not producing serotonin and the other neurotransmitters that you need to stay healthy.

In the last seven or eight years, my last couple of books have been about the connection between physical health and emotional health, and how people can use food as medicine.


If you look at the spices that have specific brain-optimization qualities –for example, saffron and your mood; cinnamon, it's a natural aphrodisiac that also helps to balance blood sugar and helps people focus; and oregano and rosemary that have been shown to boost blood flow to the brain – really what you eat is either helping your brain function better or it's hurting it."

How to Decelerate the Aging Process in Your Brain

Dr. Amen's book Use Your Brain to Change Your Age is based on his lectures over the last 15 years. In it, he discusses a study done with 8,000 people. What he found was that over time, the blood flow to your brain decreases.

"It's sort of like how your skin falls off your face as you age. The same process is happening in the brain. You can – with your behavior – accelerate the aging process, or you can decelerate it.

... We can actually prove you can improve your brain through the imaging work that we do. There's a whole chapter in the book about reclaiming your brain. Say you've been bad to your brain. You've been overweight. You've drank too much. You didn't exercise. You're one of our NFL players, and you've been hit in the head multiple times. If you adopt a brain-smart program... you can slow or even in many cases reverse the aging process in your brain."

He describes his brain-smart program as six words:

Brain Envy:"You have to care about your brain, because it controls everything you do: how you think, feel, and act, and how you get along with other people," Dr. Amen says.
Avoid Bad: "You need to avoid anything that hurts your brain – drugs obviously, brain injuries, obesity, but also sleep apnea. Anything that damages blood vessels damages the brain. Same for hypertension, cardiovascular disease, negative thinking, untreated depression, the standard American diet, and alcohol."
Do Good: This includes optimizing your diet, getting physical- and mental exercise, along with taking helpful supplements. It also includes learning to think in more positive ways.

A couple of years ago, Dr. Amen wrote a home study course for anxiety and depression. When they tested it on participants around the country, a significant percentage of them reported losing 20-30 pounds without trying.

"That got me very excited, because what I realized is with a better brain, you get a better body," he says. "Because ultimately, your health is driven by all of the decisions that you've made in your life, and those decisions come directly from the health of your brain."

More Information

You can learn more about the work at the Amen Clinics at http://www.amenclinics.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. The clinics performed brain SPECT imaging in the context of a full clinical evaluation. They also provide a wide variety of treatment options. The online community, The Amen Solution at Home was developed by Dr. Amen to be a sophisticated coaching program to help people optimize their brains and bodies.

It starts with a neuropsychological assessment tool, which, in about 35-minutes, will test your memory, reaction time, focus, level of stress, and mood. Based on how you score, it gives you personalized games to strengthen your weak areas. It also has brain healthy recipes, relaxation exercises, and teaches participants how to eliminate negative thinking patterns.

"It's one of the tools that our NFL players used," he says. "We're very excited, because as we saw their scores go up, the blood flow to their brain improved.

Working out your brain in a regular way is important... The important thing is to learn something that you don't know anything about. Because if I just kept learning about vitamin D, for example, that would be useful, but it's really not stretching my brain. So I learn about gardening, I learn about cooking, I learn a new language, I go to a new place, or learn a new way to move my body, which I think is incredibly important. But the orthodoxy in my profession is pretty rigid. And I'm saddened by it, because it needs to change. Now it became a mission for me."

While getting a SPECT scan can be expensive, it may save you tons of money in the long run. According to a recent study by Dr. Amen and his colleagues, getting a SPECT scan will change what your doctor does 79 percent of the time.

"He'll give you a different diagnosis or a different treatment plan based on what the scans add to the clinical evaluation," Dr. Amen explains.

"We have a new outcome study that we're publishing on 500 consecutive patients that came to the Amen Clinics who were complicated. After six months, 85 percent showed significant improvements in their quality of life. We are very excited about our work. And we have been teaching our colleagues about it for decades. We're not trying to be proprietary with it at all. There's a whole group in Vancouver that does it based on my work and a whole group in Toronto, Florida, Texas, and Chicago.

But it's horrifying what's happening overall in psychiatry. I would be very cautious about seeing a psychiatrist that is not gathering data on your brain before he or she puts you on multiple medications."


You can also pick up any of Dr. Amen's books, to learn more:

Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
Change Your Brain, Change Your Body
Use Your Brain to Change Your Age
Unleash the Power of the Female Brain is his latest book, which will be released in February 2013

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Do you live in Calif? Please vote "YES" on Prop 37, requiring labeling of GMO foods. -- Dr Jones

Dr Mercola under attack for pushing for labeling of GMO foods
By Dr. Mercola

We all know that labeling genetically engineered foods is a common sense right that is enjoyed by over 50 other countries, including China, India, and Russia.

But for Americans, that right has been taken away from us. The chemical companies and the junk food companies have done everything possible to hide the truth from Americans for the sake of their profits.

I knew going into this battle, that it would be a significant challenge and risk to me personally. You see, when you fight against major chemical companies like Monsanto, you're sure to get a little dirty along the way.

The processed food and chemical companies have paid over $40 million to hide the science experiment that has secretly ended up on the dinner plates of hundreds of millions of unknowing Americans. These multinational corporations are worried, and will do anything to keep you in the dark.


Keep in mind that the top six funders of "No on 37" are also the six largest pesticide companies in the world! That alone should tell you that their stance has nothing to do with your health and well-being.

This was just one of the ads that Monsanto & company have been sending voters to discredit me with lies. This is no surprise, considering how many people - inlcuding farmers, Monsanto has attacked in the past.

Prop 37's Sponsors Stand to Profit

False Claims and Misrepresentations Used to Mislead Voters

The "No on 37" campaign has been caught misinforming voters again and again over the past several months. For example, on October 18, the "California Right to Know Yes on 37" campaign requested the U.S. Department of Justice conduct a criminal investigation of the "No on 37" campaign "for possible fraudulent misuse of the official seal of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration." According to the press release:1

"The Justice Department should investigate this fraudulent dirty trick perpetrated by the 'No on 37' campaign," said Gary Ruskin, campaign manager of 'California Right to Know Yes on 37'. "They are running a campaign of lies, deceit and trickery, and some of it may be criminal."

The 'No on 37' campaign affixed the FDA's seal to one of the campaign's mailers. Section 506 of the U.S. Criminal Code states: "Whoever... knowingly uses, affixes, or impresses any such fraudulently made, forged, counterfeited, mutilated, or altered seal or facsimile thereof to or upon any certificate, instrument, commission, document, or paper of any description... shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

The letter also provides evidence that the 'No on 37' campaign falsely attributed a direct quote to the FDA in the campaign mailer. The quoted attribution, which appears below, is entirely false and fabricated. The FDA did not make this statement and does not take a position on Prop 37."

FDA on Prop 37

Other unethical transgressions employed to confuse voters who are still on the fence include:

The repeated misrepresentation of their lead spokesman, the long-time front man for the tobacco industry, Dr. Miller. In campaign advertisements, Dr. Miller has been presented as being affiliated with Stanford University, when in fact he has NO such affiliation. The misrepresentation is in direct violation of the University's policy, and when Stanford learned about the false use of its name, they demanded that the 'No on 37' campaign change the ad.
According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (the world's largest organization for food and nutrition professionals), No on 37 misled the public about the Academy's stance on genetically engineered foods in the Secretary of State's Official California Voter Information Guide. The press release2 issued by the Academy reads in part:

"...the California Official Voter Information Guide regarding Proposition 37... inaccurately states that the Academy 'has concluded that biotech foods are safe.' The statement is false... We are concerned that California voters are being misled... Voters need accurate information in order to make an informed choice."


Fuzzy Logic Used to Confuse You on the Basic Issues

The anti-choice campaign likes to claim that Prop 37 was written by trial lawyers in order to hit small grocers and growers with lawsuits. The truth is that the "Yes on Prop 37" is a grassroots effort, started by a concerned California grandmother who saw that there was no way of avoiding genetically engineered foods even if we wanted to, since they didn't have to be labeled.

The labeling campaign is about having the right to know what's in your food – just like you're informed about the nutritional content, and the presence of peanuts (important for those with allergies) and other food additives. Whether genetically engineered ingredients are good or bad for your health is really beside the point. Aspartame is not good for you, yet it's on the label, and people have the right to consume it as they please. That's all this is about – just state what it is on the label.

The Monsanto campaign claims Prop 37 is "anti-science" and would ban safe foods. This is nonsense, as Prop 37 doesn't ban anything. It simply requires the label to state whether the food contains genetically engineered ingredients or not. You're still free to sell it and buy it.


The only thing it prohibits is the mislabeling of GE foods as "all natural," a term that many tend to associate with more organic standards – which GE crops cannot comply with. You're currently paying a premium for "all-natural" foods that actually use GE ingredients, thinking you're getting something better than conventional! THAT'S hurting your wallet. Accurately labeling these foods will not.

As for their argument that genetically engineered foods have been around for many years without health problems, this is another nonsensical claim, as there's no way of tracing any potential health problems back to the food without labelling! The potential truthfulness of their claim in fact hinges on GE foods remaining unlabeled. Without labeling there's simply no way to know, because there's no way to track or trace side effects like people can now do with aspartame, or any other food allergy.

It's "Do or Die" Time...

While these chemical companies claim their genetically engineered seeds will one day feed the world, they lie to us and create massive amounts of patented genetically engineered sugar beets, soy, and corn for high fructose corn syrup.

These crops are not fit to feed cattle, much less humans. How can anyone ignore the fact these companies are producing products that are devastating human health while monopolizing our entire agriculture and food system?

The junk food grocery association has indicated Prop 37 is their #1 initiative to stop, and they are spending tens of millions to prove it. You'd think if they would be using genetically engineered foods to save the starving people around the world, labeling them should be a great way to advertise. So why do they want to prevent labeling genetically engineered foods so badly?

The LA Times has just reported the "Yes On 37" campaign still narrowly leads in the polls 44 percent to 42 percent.

We are at the crossroads and a win is within reach, but we cannot ignore the fact these chemical companies are buying votes with tens of millions of dollars by spreading lies.

So now is the time for the final push to win the Right To Know Genetically Engineered Foods by simply labeling them like over 50 other countries around the world including Russia and China.

We need to reach many Americans who don't know these genetically engineered foods have been introduced into our food supply.

Our message is simple, just like Prop 37. A few words on a label to inform consumers if products contain genetically engineered ingredients. Let's allow consumers to decide, and not the chemical companies or junk food industry.

Prop 37: Right to Know

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Prop 37 was VOTED DOWN in California. The right to know about GMO in your foods -- the requirement to label GMO-adding, was voted down. Monsanto and other GMO-promoters pumped millions into the campaign to not require labeling of GMO foods. Monsanto won.

Nov 6 was a sad day in many ways. But I'm heartened by the HUGE influx of missionaries with the lowering of the age required to so serve. It's like a "final harvest" before the missionaries are called home, I think.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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http://naturalsociety.com/anti-gmo-labe ... dium=email" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
After previously enacting numerous dirty tricks to deceive voters into voting against the labeling of genetically modified foods through California’s Prop 37 GMO labeling bill, the No on 37 campaign has now sunk to a new low. While previously being caught fraudulently using the FDA seal along with a fabricated quote attributed to the FDA in order to propel their campaign, Infowars.com reports the the latest scam involves using phony front groups to push their agenda.

Sending out flyers that are labeled as ‘voter guides’ for democrats and police officers, it has come out that these organizations are actually headed by No on 37 campaign members. The best part? None of them are actually qualified, with the head of the ‘COPS voters guide’ group being listed as a ‘political consultant’ — not a police officer. And as for the ‘Coalition for Literacy’? It turns out this is the same front group used by Big Tobacco several months ago to avoid the tobacco tax presented in Proposition 27.

See the flyers below for yourself:

noon37copsguide Anti GMO Labeling Campaign Poses as Cops, Democratic Party to Deceive Voters

noon37democratsguide Anti GMO Labeling Campaign Poses as Cops, Democratic Party to Deceive Voters

The reason for this deception is the simple fact that the No on 37 campaigners simply could not sell the public on the reality of the bill. Upwards of 95% of the United States public is in favor of labeling genetically modified organisms present in food. If the public were aware what this bill would really do, it would have no problem getting passed. You will notice all of the No on 37 campaign ads and materials never actually mention GMOs. Instead, they spit the rhetoric that it will ‘cost you big’ and that many ‘prominent’ members of society are opposed to it.

They would never tell you that GMOs have been linked to tumors, organ damage, and much more. That would be telling the truth. The only way these individuals can draw voters is through literal fraudulent behavior and outright deception.
Read more: http://naturalsociety.com/anti-gmo-labe ... z2Be5BTKlu" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Research shows the value of exercising hard, in spurts:

By Dr. Mercola

One of the biggest barriers many people face in sticking with a regular exercise program is the time it takes to do it.

Carving out an hour or two to hit the gym can seem daunting, and on some days might be completely unrealistic.

This doesn't have to be your excuse for not exercising, because a growing body of research shows you can get fit in a fraction of the time compared to the "old standard" recommendations of exercising 30 minutes to an hour most days of the week by using high-intensity interval training (HIIT) such as Peak Fitness.

How Does High-Intensity Interval Training Work?

The most recent research shows that alternating relatively short bursts of intense exercise with periods of rest can deliver many of the health and fitness benefits you get from doing hours of conventional exercise – even if done only a total of a few minutes each week.

You don't need a gym to perform high-intensity interval exercises. They can be performed with virtually any type of exercise -- with or without equipment. You can just as easily do interval training by walking or running outdoors as you can using a recumbent bike or an elliptical machine.

While it's theoretically possible to reap valuable results with as little as three minutes once a week, it might be more beneficial doing them two or three times a week for a total of 4-6 minutes of intense exertion, especially if you are not doing strength training, as recommended in my Peak Fitness workout (I'll explain this in detail below).

You do not need to do them more often than that however. In fact, doing it more frequently than two or three times a week can be counterproductive, as your body needs to recover between sessions. The key to making interval training work is, in a word, intensity.

Fat Loss, Aerobic Boosts and More: The Research Speaks for Itself

For the past couple of years, I've encouraged the use of high-intensity interval training as a key strategy for improving your health, boosting weight loss, promoting human growth hormone (HGH) production, and improving strength and stamina. I've been doing it myself since April 2010, after meeting fitness expert Phil Campbell (author of Ready Set Go), so I can also vouch for its effectiveness from personal experience.

Of course, the research on HIIT is just pouring in as well, and it's showing phenomenal results.

One study published in the Journal of Obesity1 reported that 12 weeks of HIIT not only can result in significant reductions in total abdominal, trunk, and visceral fat, but also can give you significant increases in fat-free mass and aerobic power. In this study, in which young overweight males were randomly assigned to either HIIT exercise or a control group, the following health benefits were achieved by the exercising group doing just 20 minutes of high-intensity exercises (only a fraction of the 20 minutes is done at high intensity, the rest is recovery) three times a week for three months:

Aerobic power increased by 15 percent
Reduction of total fat mass: Nearly 4.5 pounds
Visceral fat reduced by 17 percent

Other research published in the journal Cell Metabolism,2 showed that when healthy but inactive people exercise intensely, even if the exercise is brief, it produces an immediate change in their DNA. While the underlying genetic code in the muscle remains unchanged, exercise activates important structural and chemical changes associated with DNA expression within the muscles, and this contraction-induced gene activation appears to lead to the genetic reprogramming of muscle for strength, lending a molecular biological explanation for some of the well-known structural and metabolic benefits of exercise.

Several of the genes affected by an acute bout of exercise are genes involved in fat metabolism. Specifically, the study suggests that when you exercise, your body almost immediately experiences genetic activation that increases the production of fat-busting (lipolytic) enzymes.

Improve Your Heart Health and Your Insulin Sensitivity

Peak Fitness type exercises appear to be better than conventional cardio at burning fat and promoting weight loss, but it also offers additional astounding benefits to your heart and risk of chronic diseases, like diabetes. A Canadian research team gathered several groups of volunteers, including sedentary but generally healthy middle-aged men and women, and patients of a similar age who had been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease.3

The participants were asked to undertake a program of cycling intervals as their exclusive form of exercise.

After several weeks on the program, both the unfit volunteers and the cardiac patients showed significant improvements in their health and fitness. Most remarkably, the cardiac patients showed "significant improvements" in both heart and blood vessel functioning. And, contrary to what popular belief might dictate, the intense exercises did not cause any heart problems for any of the cardiac patients.

The conventional widely held belief is that the short exposure of the exercise actually helps insulate your heart from the intensity!

Equally remarkable were the results of yet another study, in which unfit but otherwise healthy middle-aged adults were able to improve their insulin sensitivity and blood sugar regulation after just two weeks of interval training (three sessions per week).4 A follow-up study also found that interval training positively impacted insulin sensitivity. In fact, the study involved people with full-blown type 2 diabetes, and just ONE interval training session was able to improve blood sugar regulation for the next 24 hours!5

This truly is amazing, and while aerobic fitness and fat loss is indeed important, improving and maintaining good insulin sensitivity is perhaps one of the most important aspects of optimal health. The fact that you can improve your insulin sensitivity significantly with a time investment of less than one hour a month really should send people straight to the gym en masse...

A Simple to Follow HIIT Approach: Peak Fitness

If you are using exercise equipment I recommend using a recumbent bicycle or an elliptical machine for your high-intensity interval training, although you certainly can use a treadmill, or sprint anywhere outdoors. You can also sprint outside but must be very careful about stretching prior to sprinting. Also, unless you are already an athlete, I would strongly advise against sprinting, as several people I know became injured doing it the first time that way. For a demonstration using an elliptical machine, please see the following video.

Here are the core principles:

Warm up for three minutes
Exercise as hard and fast as you can for 30 seconds. You should be gasping for breath and feel like you couldn't possibly go on another few seconds. It is better to use lower resistance and higher repetitions to increase your heart rate
Recover for 90 seconds, still moving, but at slower pace and decreased resistance
Repeat the high-intensity exercise and recovery 7 more times**
Cool down for a few minutes afterward by cutting down your intensity by 50-80 percent

**When you're first starting out, depending on your level of fitness, you may only be able to do two or three repetitions of the high-intensity intervals. As you get fitter, just keep adding repetitions until you're doing eight during your 20-minute session. By the end of your 30-second high-intensity period you will want to reach these markers:

It will be relatively hard to breathe and talk because you are in oxygen debt.
You will start to sweat. Typically this occurs in the second or third repetition unless you have a thyroid issue and don't sweat much normally.
Your body temperature will rise.
Lactic acid increases and you will feel a muscle "burn."

If you have a history of heart disease or any medical concern please get clearance from your health care professional to start this. Most people of average fitness will be able to do it though; it is only a matter of how much time it will take you to build up to the full 8 reps.

The remarkable effectiveness of interval training makes logical sense when you consider that this type of exertion mimics how our ancestors lived. This is also how animals and young children behave naturally (long-duration exercise really isn't "natural"). By exercising in short bursts, followed by periods of recovery, you recreate exactly what your body needs for optimum health, and that includes the production of growth hormones, the burning of excess body fat, and improved cardiovascular health and stamina.

Rounding Out Your Exercise Program

It is wise to use a wide variety of exercises in addition to Peak Fitness in order to truly optimize your health. Without variety, your body will quickly adapt and the benefits will begin to plateau. As a general rule, as soon as an exercise becomes easy to complete, you need to increase the intensity and/or try another exercise to keep challenging your body. I recommend incorporating the following types of exercise into your program:

Interval (Anaerobic) Training: As explained, this is when you alternate short bursts of high-intensity exercise with gentle recovery periods.
Strength Training: You can actually "up" the intensity by slowing it down. For more information about using super slow weight training as a form of high-intensity interval exercise, please see my interview with Dr. Doug McGuff.
Core Exercises: Your body has 29 core muscles located mostly in your back, abdomen and pelvis. This group of muscles provides the foundation for movement throughout your entire body, and strengthening them can help protect and support your back, make your spine and body less prone to injury and help you gain greater balance and stability.

You need enough repetitions to exhaust your muscles. The weight should be heavy enough that this can be done in fewer than 12 repetitions, yet light enough to do a minimum of four repetitions. It is also important NOT to exercise the same muscle groups every day. They need at least two days of rest to recover, repair and rebuild. Exercise programs like Pilates and yoga are also great for strengthening your core muscles, as are specific exercises you can learn from a personal trainer.
Stretching: My favorite type of stretching is active isolated stretches developed by Aaron Mattes. With Active Isolated Stretching, you hold each stretch for only two seconds, which works with your body's natural physiological makeup to improve circulation and increase the elasticity of muscle joints. This technique also allows your body to repair itself and prepare for daily activity. You can also use devices like the Power Plate to help you stretch.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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I have been doing the "exercise in spurts" method, typically before breakfast. My thigh muscles are definitely growing and my waist trimming...

Today, Dr Mercola talks about chiropractics.

Mercola.com and the Producers of this film are PROUD to offer a FREE Viewing of this Documentary for a LIMITED TIME. Please share this documentary with all of your friends and family!



By Dr. Mercola

Did you know that while the United States makes up only five percent of the world's population, we consume over 50 percent of all the world's pharmaceutical drugs?

This sobering statistic and much more is revealed in Jeff Hays' documentary film, Doctored.

The primary focus of the film is on the chiropractic profession and its long-standing struggle to be recognized as authentic health professionals. In the 1980's, chiropractors were still by and large viewed as quacks whose treatments were unscientific and potentially dangerous. Worse yet, chiropractors were also derided as 'cultists' at a time when Charles Manson and his cult followers wrought terror in California, and Jim Jones persuaded his followers to drink the Kool-Aid spiked with deadly poison.

Yes, chiropractors were tossed in with this charming lot!

However, this bizarre consensus reality in which chiropractors were deemed "unscientific cultists" on par with some of the most heinous criminals in US history was, as the evidence shows, doctored by the medical industry at the behest of Big Pharma. As stated in the beginning of the film:

"There's been a deliberate campaign to label anybody who doesn't sell or distribute drugs, surgery or radiation as a quack."

Supreme Court Found AMA GUILTY of Conspiracy to Destroy Chiropractic Industry

The modern medical system is committed to branding virtually all serious competition to their flawed model by labeling it 'quackery.' But what most people fail to realize is that this effort is rather like the witch hunts of old, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of men and women in possession of priceless knowledge and understanding of the healing powers of the natural world. That extermination of ancient wisdom no doubt helped drive mankind deep into ignorance, setting the people of the West on a path that would quickly sever our innate connection with Nature.

The results of this separation from time honored ancient healing practices and our ignorance of our symbiotic place within the natural world are clearly evident today...

The film includes the groundbreaking and historical case of Wilk vs. The American Medical Association (AMA) – a case in which the AMA was ultimately found guilty of an illegal conspiracy to "contain and eliminate the chiropractic profession," in 1984. The Supreme Court ordered the AMA to cease their illegal treatment of the chiropractic profession, and in the years since, chiropractic has slowly but surely established its usefulness and scientific merit.

Still, there's plenty of room for improvement.

Doctored includes eye-opening interviews not only with chiropractic and osteopathic doctors (including myself), it also talks to surgeons, MD's, pharmaceutical sales reps, and high-profile patients like Olympic Gold Medalist Picabo Street and John Stockton from the NBA Hall of Fame who regularly challenged my favorite player Michael Jordan, as well as regular patients who went looking for a better way to achieve health.

All in all, the testimony spells out the point of the film, which is that conventional medicine, backed and ruled by the pharmaceutical industry, is corrupt to the core and frequently does more harm than good, while simultaneously protecting their business and hiding its ineffectiveness by suppressing legitimate, safe, and effective alternative or complementary practices such as chiropractic.

What is the Solution?

Doctored clearly spells out the solution to the problem:

The public must have the right to learn the truth about what health really is
You need to take more personal responsibility for your health

This is the very core of my personal mission. Virtually every article on this site is focused on how to optimize your health by embracing a few basic tenets of truth. Health is about much more than the masking of symptoms! True health is a state of optimal functioning, physically, mentally, emotionally, and you could even throw in spiritually, if you really want to achieve the highest pinnacle of health and inner harmony and well-being.

Clearly, conventional medical science has its place. If you're in a car accident, your nearest trauma center is a blessing that can save your life. However, to believe that you can create good health by taking drugs to mask your symptoms is a dangerous pipe dream. It simply won't happen.

What DOES Make You Healthy?

While science can and will discover techniques and strategies that can be profoundly beneficial for your health, there are certain foundational basics that are unlikely to ever change, and these include:

Optimize insulin and leptin levels through minimizing your sugar, processed food and grain carbohydrates and replacing them with healthy fats such as butter, animal fat, coconut oil, avocados, seeds and nuts.
Eat a healthy diet of whole organic foods, and pay careful attention to keeping your insulin levels down by avoiding sugar/fructose and grains. I make this easy with my recently updated and free Nutrition Plan.


Drink plenty of clean water.
Manage your stress.
Exercise regularly and correctly by incorporating high intensity exercises, which is how your body was designed to perform.
Get safe and appropriate sun exposure to optimize your vitamin D.
Limit exposure to toxins of all kinds.
Consume healthy fats and avoid processed fats like nearly all commercial vegetable seed oils that are high in omega-6 fats.
Eat plenty of raw food.
Get plenty of sleep.
The pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, and even government itself, will not make it easy for you to avoid the garbage that ruins your health, but remember, leading a common sense, healthy lifestyle is your best bet to produce a healthy body and mind, and increase your longevity. And best of all, YOU have the power to change your own lifestyle to make sure the 10 foundational basics listed above are covered.

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Your Waist Size Can Be a Powerful Predictor of Hypertension and Other Chronic Diseases
November 14 2012 | 71,291 views

By Dr. Mercola

The size of your waistline may be the key to a long life, according to an observational study conducted by the Mayo Clinic1, involving nearly 13,000 Americans who were followed for about 14 years.

In a presentation in August at the European Society of Cardiology Congress, senior author Francisco Lopez-Jimenez said that people who are of normal weight, but who have a high waist-to-hip ratio (i.e. belly fat), have an even higher risk of death than people who are considered obese, based on BMI alone.

The risk of cardiovascular death was 2.75 times higher, and the risk of death from all causes was 2.08 times higher in people of normal weight with central obesity, compared with those with a normal body mass index and normal waist-to-hip ratio. According to Dr. Lopez-Jimenez:

"We knew from previous research that central obesity is bad, but what is new in this research is that the distribution of the fat is very important even in people with a normal weight. This group has the highest death rate, even higher than those who are considered obese based on body mass index. From a public health perspective, this is a significant finding."

The increased mortality risk accompanying higher ratios of visceral fat — the fat that accumulates around your internal organs — is likely due, at least in part, to increased insulin resistance. As I've stated in many previous articles, insulin and leptin resistance or signaling impairment, is one of the foundational problems underlying virtually all disease, and visceral fat is associated with insulin resistance and other risk factors. Insulin resistance also accelerates the aging process itself.

Your Waist Size May Also Help Assess Your Hypertension Risk

In related news, the importance of your waist-to-hip ratio was again highlighted in a study2 showing that your waist size may also be a more effective measure for assessing obesity-related hypertension risk.

Normally, your blood pressure will drop 10-20 percent during nighttime sleep, compared to your daytime values. A lack of nighttime dipping has previously been observed in overweight and obese populations, suggesting a correlation between non-dipping nighttime blood pressure and an increased risk of hypertension.

The goal of the study was to evaluate the predictive ability of waist-to-hip ratio on nighttime blood pressure dipping, relative to BMI, and while both BMI and waist-to-hip ratio were significant predictors of nighttime dips in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, the waist measurement was more telling. So, if you have a high waist-to-hip ratio, i.e. you carry more fat around your waist than on your hips, you may be at greater risk for obesity-related hypertension, indicated by a reduction in nighttime blood pressure dipping.

Are You Carrying Dangerous Fat Around Your Midsection?

Unfortunately, two out of three people in the U.S. are overweight and one out of three is obese, and the rest of the world is not far behind. It has been my experience that many people are in denial about being overweight, as being "large" has become more or less the norm. But just because something is common does not mean it's a "healthy normal." And we're not talking about aesthetics here.

Certain body compositions do tend to increase your risk of chronic disease, and carrying extra inches around your midsection has been repeatedly shown to increase cardiovascular health risks. Your waist size is also a powerful indicator of insulin sensitivity, as studies clearly show that measuring your waist size is one of the most powerful ways to predict your risk for diabetes.

Waist circumference is far better than BMI for evaluating whether or not you may have a weight problem, as BMI fails to factor in both how muscular you are, and your intra-abdominal fat mass. You can go about measuring your waist in two different ways.

The two featured studies used waist-to-hip measurement. This is done by measuring the circumference of your hips at the widest part, across your buttocks. Then measure your waist at the smallest circumference of your natural waist, just above your belly button. Divide your waist measurement by your hip measurement to get the ratio. (The University of Maryland offers an online waist-to-hip ratio calculator3 you can use.) The Mayo Clinic used the following waist-to-hip ratio designations:

Another even simpler method to figure out if you have a weight problem is to measure only your waist circumference (the distance around the smallest area below the rib cage and above your belly button). Waist circumference is the easiest anthropometric measure of total body fat. A general guide for healthy waist circumference is as follows:

How's Your Blood Pressure?

According to the CDC, high blood pressure is the second greatest public health threat in the US. Insulin resistance and elevated uric acid levels are significantly associated with hypertension, so any program adopted to address high blood pressure needs to help normalize these two factors.

Fortunately, this can actually be easier than you might think, but it does require you to make some lifestyle changes. The good news is, if you're carrying a little more weight around your midsection than might be good for your health, and you struggle with high blood pressure and/or elevated uric acid levels, altering your diet will address all of these issues simultaneously.

I recently updated my nutrition plan, which will help guide you step-by-step toward normalizing your insulin and leptin levels, which in turn will help normalize your blood pressure and help you shed excess weight. My plan summarizes all I have learned from treating over 25,000 patients and reviewing tens of thousands of articles on natural health. It's a free resource that can help you and your family radically improve your health, or take it to the next level if you've already started making changes.

Ideally your blood pressure should be about 120/80 without medication. If you are on medication, you will be delighted to know that this nutrition plan tends to normalize elevated blood pressures in the vast majority of people to the point you may no longer need your blood pressure medication. According to the most recent report (issued 2003) by the Joint National Committee (JNC) on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure, the following guidelines apply for determining whether you might suffer from hypertension:
Blood Pressure Classification Systolic Diastolic
Normal <120 and <80
Pre-hypertension 120-139 or 80-89
Stage 1 Hypertension 140-159 or 90-99
Stage 2 Hypertension ≥160 or ≥100

per JNC 7 Express, December 2003

How to Avoid a False Hypertension Diagnosis

Keep in mind that your blood pressure readings can vary significantly from day to day – even from morning to evening, and often within the same hour, so don't panic if you get one high reading here or there. It is when your blood pressure remains consistently elevated that significant health problems can occur. The following variables can also affect the va­lidity of your blood pressure reading:

If you're overweight, a size 'average' blood pressure cuff can lead to a falsely elevated blood pressure reading, so make sure your doctor or health care professional is using the right size cuff for your size.
Incorrect arm position: If your blood pressure is taken while your arm is parallel to your body, your reading can be up to 10 percent higher than it really is. Blood pressure readings should always be taken with your arm at a right angle to your body.
White coat hypertension, which is an elevation in blood pressure caused by the stress or fear associated with visits to doctors and other medical personnel, can be a transient but serious concern. Stress reduction in this situation is key. To decrease your risk of being falsely diagnosed with hypertension in this situation, I'd encourage you to take a moment to calm down, then breathe deeply and relax when you're getting your blood pressure taken.

Although elevated insulin levels are one of the most potent contributors to elevated blood pressure, it's also common for chronic stress, tension or anxiety to contribute to this problem. After you begin my nutrition plan and follow it for several months, if you don't see an improvement in your blood pressure I'd recommend seeking out a health care professional who is well-versed in using stress-relief methods, such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) for example.

How to Take Control of Your Blood Pressure AND Your Waist Size

To address both of the issues covered in this article: a greater than ideal waist size and high blood pressure, first thing you need to do is remove all grains and sugars, particularly fructose, from your diet until both your weight and your blood pressure have normalized. Again, following my comprehensive nutrition plan can help you take control of your diet in an incremental manner.

To emphasize how important this one action can be, consider the following: According to a 2010 study4, those who consumed 74 grams or more per day of fructose (the equivalent of about 2.5 sugary drinks) had a 77 percent greater risk of having blood pressure levels of 160/100 mmHg. Consuming 74 grams or more of fructose daily also increased the risk of a 135/85 blood pressure reading by 26 percent, and 140/90 by 30 percent.

This is significant because the average American now consumes about 70 grams of fructose EVERY day! Worse yet, about 25 percent of all Americans consume over 134 grams of fructose a day, according to research by Dr. Richard Johnson, chief of the division of kidney disease and hypertension at the University of Colorado, and author of two books on the dangers of fructose, The Sugar Fix, and The Fat Switch.

As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day. However, for most people – especially if you struggle with high blood pressure and insulin resistance – it would be wise to limit your fructose to 15 grams or less, as it is virtually guaranteed that you will consume "hidden" sources of fructose from most beverages and just about any processed food you might eat.

Fructose — the Primary Trigger of Your "Fat Switch"

To learn more about how fructose impacts your weight and health, I highly recommend reading Dr. Richard Johnson's new book The Fat Switch. In it, he reviews groundbreaking new research showing that eating too much and exercising too little are NOT solely responsible for why you keep gaining weight or have trouble shedding those excess pounds.

His research shows that metabolic syndrome (characterized by central obesity or increased waist circumference, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance) is actually a normal condition that animals undergo to store fat. Animals' ability to gain "hibernation fat" appears to be regulated by a switch in the mitochondria that is turned on and off by a common food that no longer provides survival advantage to humans living in contemporary society, namely fructose.

Fructose-containing sugars cause weight gain not by the calories they contain, but by triggering this "fat switch," which tells your body it's time to store fat, just as if you were an animal preparing for hibernation. Furthermore, uric acid is increased by fructose, and also causally contributes to obesity and insulin resistance. Effective treatment of obesity therefore requires turning off your fat switch — by avoiding fructose, which is the trigger — and improving the function of your cells' mitochondria.

According to Dr. Johnson:

"Those of us who are obese eat more because of a faulty "switch," and exercise less because of a low energy state. If you can learn how to control the specific "switch" located in the powerhouse of each of your cells – the mitochondria – you hold the key to fighting obesity."

I highly recommend picking up a copy of Dr. Johnson's book, The Fat Switch which has been described as the "Holy Grail" for those struggling with their weight.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Dangers of breast implants.

By Dr. Mercola

There are many millions of women who receive breast implants for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately many are simply unaware of some of the dangers associated with them.

Whether you're a woman who has, or is considering, breast implants, or you have a loved one who is, this interview with Susan Kolb M.D., F.A.C.S., A.B.I.H.M. provides invaluable information that could drastically improve your health.

Dr. Kolb is the founder of Plastikos Surgery Center and Millennium Healthcare in Atlanta, Georgia, which is one of the few holistic plastic and reconstructive surgery centers around.

She has developed treatment protocols to help women with silicone, chemical, and biotoxicity problems from breast implants, and she also authored the book "The Naked Truth About Breast Implants: From Harm to Healing," which goes into far more detail about breast implant risks, associated illnesses, and what to do about them.

As the most common cosmetic surgery procedures, with more than 300,000 breast augmentations performed in the United States each year for both reconstructive and cosmetic reasons,1 this is an issue that is impacting a significant number of, largely uninformed and unsuspecting, women.

Silicone Implants are Prone to Leakage of Cancer-Causing, Neurotoxic Agents

Any time you introduce a foreign material into your body, there's a potential for problems to develop. Breast implants are no different, and issues can arise from both silicone and saline implants due to both the materials used and the potential for bacteria and fungus to proliferate.

Silicone implants may pose a unique risk, as they are prone to leakage. Dr. Kolb shared her own personal experience with leaking silicone implants:

"The first symptom involved the chest wall on the left side, none on the right. I had burning pain that went up to my armpit and down my arm. I started having numbness and tingling in my left arm. Fortunately, I'm right-handed. I started developing thoracic outlet syndrome which, for those not familiar with that, is when you have inflammation in your armpit, the main nerve coming out of the chest to the arm can become inflamed and act in a way that you get weakness and numbness, which is a neurological problem.

I was actually diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome, but it was all completely due to the silicone inflammation in the armpit. I didn't have a rupture, which is fortunate, but I did leak out a great deal of silicone. Then after that, I had very, very interesting symptoms: sinus problems (which almost all the women have), new-onset allergies, new-onset dizziness. Eighty-two percent of women with leaking silicone gel implants had dizziness.

It's a neurotoxin. Many of the chemicals that Dow Corning [maker of silicone implants] identified in the trials … are carcinogens, and many are neurotoxins. Oddly enough, the plastic surgeons don't know the list of chemicals that are actually in the gel."

Now, as Dr. Kolb explained, these implants do not last a lifetime, so if you have them (whether they're silicone or saline), you can expect to have them removed or replaced in an average of 8-10 years. If you get mammograms or are involved in a car accident or have other trauma to your chest wall, this time frame of relative safety may be even less, and the rate of leakage and rupture is "very high," Dr. Kolb noted.

" … typically the engineering data say that this leakage inside the human body will occur between eight to 12 years, or as soon as eight years, which is when mine started," Dr. Kolb said. "It started to leak out and those chemicals, which are neurotoxins, and carcinogens or cancer-causing agents will then affect the women. The neurotoxins will affect the area on the side of the rupture or leakage. For me, it was the left side.

In the case of carcinogens, they go into the body, and they can affect a lot of different things. It's very interesting that the carcinogens do not increase the risk of breast cancer. In fact, in women with implants, breast cancer is felt to be four-fold less than women without implants, because of the pressure, the silica, and the cytokines. One of the cytokines that increases in the chest wall is tumor necrosis factor. Breast cancer is actually less common. But other cancers such as lung cancer, colon cancer and pancreatic cancer, and some very nasty cancers are actually increased in women with breast implant problems, according to peer-reviewed literature."

Saline Implants May be Just as Dangerous as Silicone

Saline implants are made with the same shell as silicone implants, but because they're filled with a saline (saltwater) solution are widely regarded as safer than silicone in the event of a rupture or leak. The problem is that if the valve used to fill the implant is damaged, which can occur during a mammogram or car accident, it can lead to serious problems with bacterial and fungal growth.

Dr. Kolb explained:

"Once the valve is damaged, especially in certain implants, mold and bacteria can grow inside the implant. If the valve damage causes the implant just to deflate, then the woman will go ahead and get it changed out, and she won't become ill. But in some implants, the valve injury does not cause the fluid to leak out, but can allow bacteria and especially mold and fungus inside the implant.

I've had patients who have had inside the saline in this implant a mold called pennicillium growing. Whenever somebody hugged them too hard or even [due to] breast exams … the patient can become very ill, specifically because she was allergic to penicillin. She would have an anaphylactic-type reaction whenever her implant was manipulated. It can be very, very serious.

… In general, women who have this … bacterial and mold infection in their chest are deathly ill. The mold produces a biotoxin that's also a neurotoxin. Many of my women come in in wheelchairs. They come in with the diagnosis of MS and lupus together. Fortunately, they have neither.

But some of them are incredibly ill. They have severe mental clouding. They can't even have a conversation. They can't hold their head up … Many doctors have said they're going to die, but of course, they find me and come in."

Removing Leaking or Ruptured Implants May Save Your Life

If you're a woman experiencing health effects from a leaking or ruptured breast implant, having explantation surgery to remove the implants is often extremely effective at resolving the health issues, and this is an area Dr. Kolb specializes in.

"Within a week [of explantation surgery], they're up. They're out of their wheelchair. They may still have some cognitive issues to work through, because detoxification of the biotoxins does take some time. But the results are just incredible. I will say that when you do surgery on somebody who has mold in and around their breast implants, you treat them with antifungals, and you do the biotoxin detoxification, because the biotoxin is not the mold. The biotoxin is produced by the mold. It's a tiny molecule that gets on the nerves, causes dysfunction, and is sometimes hard to get out of the body.

One quarter of the human population can't get rid of the biotoxin, and that's the portion susceptible to what we call sick building syndrome … Sick building syndrome is just when you get the biotoxin but not necessarily the mold, like in a sick building. They can breathe that in. In my patients, the sick building is actually inside their chest wall, so they can never get away from it. That's the problem with that.

But I can get these women with saline implants better quicker than I can a ruptured silicone implant. That's because with silicone the chemicals go all over the body. They actually find silicone in the brain and organs. People cough up silicone. There's silicone coming out of their nose when they blow their nose. There are lesions all over the person's chest and extremities. Those are lesions that scar, and there's silica, sand-like stuff coming out.

Those women – I think – have a more rocky course, a longer detoxification. And as you can imagine, those chemical toxins are a lot harder to get out of the body than the biotoxins are."

Dr. Kolb also uses a variety of protocols that involve a number of nutraceuticals and homeopathic remedies for additional support, as health issues stemming from breast implant complications can impact your entire body. She explained:

"The protocols are actually found at http://www.Plastikos.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;, or you can just Google "silicone immune protocol" or you can just Google my name. It'll come up as well. The protocols are changing … a good protocol is always changing because new things are coming out.

We revise the protocols and keep them up on the website. I would encourage people to take a look at the protocols. They've very extensive, though, as there are many different categories which you need to treat. They need something for their immune system; they need something for their endocrine support – because the endocrine system is also taken out, because the entire hypothalamus is taken out.

You not only get problems with the adrenals, which are treated with adrenal support. You have problems with sex hormones. You have problems with the thyroid, so their hair falls out, they gain weight, and they have dry skin and constipation, although their thyroid tests are always normal. They also have ADH deficiencies, so they drink and pee all the time. ADH is anti-diuretic hormone, and that allows one to hold on to water.

They're not diabetic, but they just drink and pee all the time because of a disruption of the hypothalamus endocrine system. It now occurs both from biotoxins and chemical toxins. Both women with silicone and saline implants generally have these problems."

Be Very Careful in Choosing a Surgeon to Address Implant Complications

Personally, if I were a woman and had a breast implant, I would visit Dr. Kolb in Atlanta directly, but obviously not everyone will be able to do this. If you are considering surgery to resolve implant complications, you need to be careful to choose a surgeon that will provide high-quality care. Dr. Kolb shared some guidelines for doing so:

"I would advise people to ask a surgeon how many explantation surgeries they've done. Unlike putting implants in, taking them out is very technically difficult, especially if they're under the muscle. There can be a very thin layer of tissue between the lung and the capsule. You have to know how to do this correctly, or you can get what we call pneumothorax or entering into the chest cavity, which is where you're not supposed to be.

Surgeons who have not done at least 50 explantations do not know about all the different things you might encounter, and are not comfortable removing the entire capsule. They probably should not be doing the surgery. Leaving the capsule behind is quite dangerous in terms of the patient not getting well. There is not only silicone in that scar capsule, but there's a biofilm of bacteria, fungi, and other elements we don't know. Biofilm is very difficult to treat with anything other than surgery, and women simply don't get well.

Many surgeons don't use drains. Surgeons not using drains are not good because that fluid needs to drain out because after all, fluid in the chest wall is a nice warm, dark space that can grow fungus. It can grow bacteria. Women often become way more ill after surgery because their surgeons gave them antibiotics without giving them antifungals. I tell all my patients, "For the rest of your life, you're going to need to take antifungals whenever you take antibiotics." And it's so true."

Dr. Kolb advises women to find a holistic integrative-trained physician using HolisticMedicine.org. She continued:

"It takes somebody with that kind of training in functional medicine to understand the detoxification programs and … do the correct testing and give the correct protocols. A lot of times, if they can't find a doctor in their area, Dr. Brad Gould, who is a part of Millennium Healthcare and who is a holistic family practice doctor, can do a telephone consult as long as they have a local doctor who can prescribe antifungals and other prescription medicines that may be necessary as part of the protocol."

Raynaud's Syndrome Often Associated with Breast Implants

Raynaud's syndrome is a rare disorder of the arteries that causes blood vessels to narrow. Typically this occurs in your fingers, but it can also impact your toes, making your hands turn cold, blue and painful. While the cause of Raynaud's is typically thought to be unknown, Dr. Kolb pointed out that it is actually linked to methyl ethyl ketone, a chemical in the shell of breast implants.

"Raynaud's is when your hands become very purple and cold especially in cold weather, very blue and painful. This is actually caused because the methyl ethyl ketone in the implant depletes arginine. The treatment for Raynaud's is you do electrolysis detox baths

I do it with hands first. Actually, put the hands in this electrolysis bath that takes the methyl ethyl ketone out of the extremities. Then I give them a fairly large dose of arginine. Occasionally, you have to get lysine at another time if they are prone to cold sores, as you know.

But in any case, it's very, very important to understand the cause of a disease if you want to treat it. I would say very, very few people know what causes Raynaud's. But I know, because I have worked with countless patients who had methyl ethyl ketone and used it every day and they got severe Raynaud's. I, also like yourself, have a program where I interview experts around the world. I was lucky enough that toxicologists tell me the role of methyl ethyl ketone in Raynaud's."

What is the Safest Kind of Breast Implant?

If you are going to get breast implants, you may have heard about the newer "gummy bear" silicone implants, in which the silicone stays mostly in one piece, rather than leaking out. But these are not the ideal choice, according to Dr. Kolb, who pointed out that virtually all silicone implants do leak to some degree. There's also a choice between smooth or textured implants, in which the smooth is the better choice because textured implants have been linked to a rare form of lymphoma. She continued:

"I have breast implants in myself. I have chosen – because I believe them to be the safest – Allergan smooth saline. Smooth is probably better than textured. The texturing can have more problems with infection, because that is just the nature of the texturing.

Any shaped implant is going to be textured. A lot of the reconstruction implants, a lot of the tissue expanders, are going to have the texturing that appears to be associated with this rare form of lymphoma. That's a problem. This will flake off. Even though there's saline inside, this will flake off and get in the lymph nodes. We see it on pathology. I prefer the smooth saline implants."

She also explained that, if you're only looking to increase about a cup size and you can wait a while longer, there is a new method of breast augmentation called stem cell fat transfer, which is currently undergoing U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) testing. During this process, fat from your thighs or hips is put through a special process, then re-injected into the breast to promote growth naturally.

One this is available, Dr. Kolb noted that it might be a better option than implants.

" … once that is FDA-approved, then that might be – especially if you only want to go about a cup size – something that women would want to wait for. You don't have to have it redone every 10 years. You can have it done more than once if you want. You can go up, say, a B to a C cup. If you want to go up a little bit later on when you put more weight on, you can do that as well."

There may, however, be unusual circumstances where implants may actually be preferred, and this would be in women with a very strong family history of breast cancer or who have undergone mastectomy after breast cancer. Dr. Kolb explained:

"I would like to say that occasionally, it is very good for a woman who's had breast cancer – mastectomy after breast cancer – to get an implant either put under the muscle, or tissue expander to be put under the muscle and be replaced by an implant, because the pressure, the silica, and the cytokines in the area decrease the risk of local recurrence tremendously.

I know this because we have a cancer clinic here and I've treated breast cancer patients doing the mastectomies and reconstruction for over 30 years. It's very rare to see a local recurrence in a reconstructive patient versus someone with a TRAM flap, or where the tissues are moved from somewhere else.

In that particular patient and also in a patient who has a very, very strong family history of breast cancer, instead of removing their breast, they might want to get an implant put in and take advantage of the decrease, the four-fold decrease in breast cancer, along with holistic treatments, of course."

For Even More Information …

If you or a loved one has breast implants, certainly listening to this interview a few times until you understand it at a deep level would be wisely recommended. But I also suggest Dr. Kolb's book, "The Naked Truth About Breast Implants: From Harm to Healing," for even more in-depth information.

"For women that are considering breast implants or have breast implants and would want to know more about the maintenance and care of them, they can go to http://www.TheNakedTruthAboutBreastImplants.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;, and there read the table of contents of the book, as well as the foreword by Dr. Douglas Shanklin. Dr. Shanklin was the premier silicone researcher and he wrote the foreword to the book – very interesting information there.

And then, read the book. The book has the scientific information that I have figured out to date, including a large amount of peer-reviewed literature. It includes a large amount of the clinical material that I have figured out to date. Of course, we're always figuring out more information, and we're trying to put that up on the website when we are able to find that out."

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Improving SLEEP.



By Dr. Mercola

Sleep is such an important part of your overall health that no amount of healthful food and exercise can counteract the ill effects of poor sleeping habits. Researchers have linked poor sleep to a number of health ailments, from short-term memory loss and behavioral problems, to weight gain and diabetes, for example.

There are many reasons for not getting a good night's sleep. Unfortunately, most people tend to reach for a sleeping pill instead of doing the work to figure out what's got them tossing and turning.

The featured article lists1 10 common sleep mistakes you can address without drugs. Here are five of them. For the rest, please see the featured article2:

Using the snooze button. While a few minutes more in bed may be tempting, using the snooze button could backfire as interrupted sleep can increase your fatigue. It's best to just get up on the first alarm
Irregular sleep schedule. A regular routine of going to bed and getting up around the same time each day will help promote better sleep, while constantly interrupting your schedule around can easily lead to insomnia and fatigue
Taking long naps during the day
Eating sugar before bedtime. Sugar alters the chemical balance in your body, which can contribute to impaired sleep
Drinking coffee or caffeinated beverages too late in the day

Understanding Why and How Insomnia Occurs

A new book called Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, written by David Randall, was inspired by Randall's own troubles getting proper shut-eye. Since writing the book, he's been diagnosed with non-REM arousal parasomnia, a sleep disorder that can cause night terrors and sleepwalking. He discussed his book and his own bizarre sleeping habits in a recent NPR interview3. You can read more or listen to his story here.

Fortunately, sleep disorders such as sleepwalking and night terrors are not the primary reasons for impaired sleep. The vast majority of people who have trouble sleeping suffer with insomnia; the inability to fall asleep or stay asleep throughout the night. And while many complain their insomnia appears "impossible" to cure, there is hope...

Two years ago, I interviewed Dr. Rubin Naiman, a clinical psychologist, author, teacher, and the leader in integrative medicine approaches to sleep and dreams. In that interview, we discussed several important factors that affect your sleep, for better or worse. While the list provided by Lifehack (above) offers some helpful tips to help you get a better night's sleep, it can be extremely helpful to first understand why and how insomnia occurs in the first place.

In order to understand why you can't sleep, you need to understand that sleep is an outcome of two types of variables:

Sleepiness – Under normal conditions, your sleepiness should increase throughout the day, peaking just before you go to bed at night. This is ideal, as you want your sleep to be high at the beginning of the night.

Making sure you're exposed to bright sunlight, and high-quality lighting during the day, followed by decreased light exposure once the sun sets, will help maximize your natural sleep cycle so that you're appropriately sleepy at the end of the evening.
"Noise" – "Noise" occurs in three zones: the mind level, body level, and the environmental level. If the noise is conceptually greater than your level of sleepiness, you will not fall asleep.

The most common type of mind noise is called "cognitive popcorn," or unstoppable thoughts running through your mind at night. Examples of body noise include pain, discomfort, indigestion, side effects from prescription drugs, or residual caffeine from drinking coffee too late in the day. Environmental noise is usually obvious, such as noises in your room or house, a snoring partner, music, lights, or being too hot.

In order to get a good night's sleep, you want:

sleepiness level to be high, and
the noise level to be low

More often than not, the reason why you can't fall asleep is NOT because you're not sleepy enough, but rather because you're subjected to excessive noise, which, again, can be either mind/body/environmental-type noise, or a combination thereof. Typically, people will find between three to six different factors that contribute to the noise burden keeping them awake. Therefore, don't give up if you've addressed the most obvious source of noise and still can't sleep. Keep looking! You need to really evaluate your environment and your inner and outer state to determine and address ALL the contributing factors.

For Optimal Health You Need Proper Sleep

You may have the healthiest lifestyle in the world, eat the best possible organic food, avoid all sugar and processed foods, eat loads of fermented veggies, have an ideal body fat and work out regularly with an ideal Peak Fitness regimen, but if you fail to sleep well regularly, for whatever reason, it is virtually impossible to be optimally healthy. Interrupted or impaired sleep can cause a ripple-effect capable of wreaking all sorts of havoc in your body and health. For example, poor sleep can:
Dramatically weaken your immune system Impair production of melatonin – a hormone AND a potent antioxidant, which also has cancer-fighting properties
Accelerate tumor growth – tumors grow two to three times faster in laboratory animals with severe sleep dysfunctions Raise your risk of heart disease
Cause a pre-diabetic state, making you feel hungry even if you've already eaten, which can wreak havoc on your weight Raise your risk of stomach ulcers
Seriously impair your memory; even a single night of poor sleep – meaning sleeping only 4 to 6 hours – can impact your ability to think clearly the next day Contribute to constipation
Impair your performance on physical or mental tasks, and decrease your problem solving ability Contribute to mood disorders like depression

The Link Between Sleep and Migraines

In recent news, the links between poor sleep and migraines have also been examined. As explained by Eric Metcalf, MPH in a WebMD feature4, migraines and sleep appear to have a distinct, albeit complicated relationship. Both too little and too much sleep can trigger a migraine attack. On the downside, the mechanisms involved are still unknown. On the upside, there are ways to ease both problems, and addressing your sleep habits is key. He writes:

"Anne Calhoun, MD, is a headache specialist in Chapel Hill, N.C. She's particularly interested in sleep issues.In one of her studies, 43 women with chronic migraines were taught how to improve their sleep habits. In the group of women who addressed their bad sleep habits successfully, all but one saw their headache frequency decline until most days were headache-free."

Calhoun offers eight different steps to help clean up your sleep hygiene, many of which are identical to those mentioned elsewhere in this article, however the following four recommendations apply more specifically to those with migraines:

Change your thinking. Some people whose migraines strike at night become afraid to go to sleep, Sahota says. If worrying about your migraines is keeping you from resting, consider talking to a counselor who works with people with chronic pain. An approach called cognitive behavioral therapy can help you learn how to adopt healthier thoughts and behaviors related to your migraines.
Comfort yourself. When you have a migraine, some people find that placing cold packs on their head helps them sleep, while others prefer a warm pack, Sahota says. Try each to see which kind helps you more.
Take a two-pronged approach. After taking medication to stop a migraine, lie down in a dark, cool, quiet room. As you're sleeping, the medicine can go to work so you wake up feeling better.
Review your medications. Ask your doctor if any medicines you're taking – including migraine drugs – can wake you up or make your sleep less restful. If so, taking them in the morning may help limit their effect on your sleep, Calhoun says. Getting to sleep without relying on medicine is the best option, Calhoun and Sahota say. So work on your sleep habits first. If you still can't get better sleep, talk it over with your health care provider.

Sleepless Nights May Put the Aging Brain at Risk of Dementia

In another recent NPR radio program5, the links between sleep problems and dementia were reviewed. According to NPR:

"Psychiatrist Kristine Yaffe of the University of California, San Francisco, runs a memory disorders clinic and studies people who are at risk of developing dementia and cognitive impairment. She says many of her older patients 'either have difficulty falling asleep, waking up on and off throughout the night, or feeling tired in the day' and have to nap a lot.

Yaffe recently conducted a series of studies evaluating more than 1,300 adults older than 75, initially assessing their sleep patterns and, five years later, their cognitive abilities. She found that those with sleep-disordered breathing or sleep apnea had more than twice the odds of developing dementia years later. Those who developed disruptions of their circadian rhythm were also at increased risk. So were those who awoke throughout the night, tossing and turning. "

Yaffe's findings were presented at the annual conference of the Alzheimer's Association, but while her research suggests there may be an association between poor sleep and dementia, more research is needed to confirm these links. Another psychologist interviewed by NPR offers several techniques to her patients to help them improve their sleep by literally relearning how to go to sleep. Her recommendations include:

Restrict the amount of time you sleep. Start at only five hours or so, and slowly add 15-minute increments until you reach a full eight hours per night
Limit time spent in bed to sleep and sex only. Never watch TV, read, pay your bills, or surf the internet, for example, while in bed
If you don't fall asleep within 20 minutes, get up and do something relaxing and/or boring until you start feeling sleepy. Then lay down again
Get rid of your clock. If you need the alarm, cover the clock with a cloth so you cannot look at the time

Can a Sleep Measuring Device Help You Sleep Better?

ZEO is an innovative sleep measurement device that you can use at home. It's an electronic device with a headband that emits a signal into what looks like an alarm clock. What this device allows you to do is to perform a personalized 'sleep study' at home. It's strongly correlated with polysonography, which you typically have to go to a sleep center to get, and pay big bucks for – around $2,000 for just one night.

The ZEO allows you to measure your sleep night after night, for as long as you want. So the device lets you evaluate how various factors affect your sleep. For example, you can evaluate how your sleep was affected by a cup of coffee in the afternoon, or how doing computer work past a certain hour impacted your sleep.

The data collection is quite sophisticated. It will show you time awake, how long it took you to fall asleep, time in light sleep, time in deep sleep, and time in REM sleep. It distributes this information over a graph and gives you percentages, along with an accumulative score of your sleep over time. It's a sophisticated device that I think can be used in a really positive way.

How to Optimize Your Sleep Sanctuary

For a comprehensive list of factors that can contribute to insomnia, and how to remedy them, please see my previous article, Secrets to a Good Night's Sleep. Here are seven of the most important factors that can help you get a good night's rest.

Sleep in complete darkness, or as close to it as possible. Even the tiniest bit of light in the room can disrupt your internal clock and your pineal gland's production of melatonin and serotonin. Even the tiniest glow from your clock radio could be interfering with your sleep. This will help decrease your risk of cancer. Close your bedroom door, and get rid of night-lights. Refrain from turning on any light at all during the night, even when getting up to go to the bathroom. Cover up your clock radio. Cover your windows – I recommend using blackout shades or drapes.

All life evolved in response to predictable patterns of light and darkness, called circadian rhythms. Modern day electrical lighting has significantly betrayed your inner clock by disrupting your natural rhythms. Little bits of light pass directly through your optic nerve to your hypothalamus, which controls your biological clock. Light signals your brain that it's time to wake up and starts preparing your body for ACTION.
Keep the temperature in your bedroom no higher than 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Many people keep their homes and particularly their upstairs bedrooms too warm. Studies show that the optimal room temperature for sleep is quite cool, between 60 to 68 degrees. Keeping your room cooler or hotter can lead to restless sleep. When you sleep, your body's internal temperature drops to its lowest level, generally about four hours after you fall asleep. Scientists believe a cooler bedroom may therefore be most conducive to sleep, since it mimics your body's natural temperature drop.
Check your bedroom for electro-magnetic fields (EMFs). These can disrupt the pineal gland and the production of melatonin and serotonin, and may have other negative effects as well. To do this, you need a gauss meter. You can find various models online, starting around $50 to $200. Some experts even recommend pulling your circuit breaker before bed to kill all power in your house.
Move alarm clocks and other electrical devices away from your bed. If these devices must be used, keep them as far away from your bed as possible, preferably at least 3 feet. Remove the clock from view. It will only add to your worry when you stare at it all night... 2 a.m. ...3 a.m. ...4:30 a.m.
Avoid using loud alarm clocks. It is very stressful on your body to be suddenly jolted awake. If you are regularly getting enough sleep, an alarm may even be unnecessary. I gave up my alarm clock years ago and now use a sun alarm clock, an alarm that combines the features of a traditional alarm clock (digital display, AM/FM radio, beeper, snooze button, etc.) with a special built-in light that gradually increases in intensity, simulating sunrise.
Reserve your bed for sleeping. If you are used to watching TV or doing work in bed, you may find it harder to relax and drift off to sleep, so avoid doing these activities in bed.
Consider separate bedrooms. Recent studies suggest, for many people, sharing a bed with a partner (or pets) can significantly impair sleep, especially if the partner is a restless sleeper or snores. If bedfellows are consistently interfering with your sleep, you may want to consider a separate bedroom.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Interesting approach to relieving muscle pain, restore full usage...
By Dr. Mercola
The chiropractic profession contains some of the most profoundly innovative physicians that I am aware of, and Dr. Craig Buhler is one of them. His work focuses on the interrelationships between muscle function, range of motion, and restriction that contribute to pain. In 2002, he established the Advanced Muscle Integration Technique (AMIT) in a clinic in Utah, where I've seen him as a patient. One of the reasons that motivated me to see him is his phenomenal success in treating world-class professional and Olympic athletes, and helping them improve their performance.

I first became aware of Dr. Buhler's work through Jeff Hays, the producer of the film Doctored, which has just been released. Dr. Buhler and I are both featured in the film but he was actually one of the major inspirations for the film..

Dr. Buhler was the chiropractic physician for the professional basketball team Utah Jazz for 26 years. And as a result of his techniques, the team had the lowest injury rate in the NBA — 61 player-missed games due to injury within a 20-year long span, compared to the league average of 171 in the same timeframe.

"Then, when I stopped having access to the players, we had the most rapid increase in player-missed games due to injury rates in the league in the history of that 25-year period," he says. "It validates what happens when you use the technique that I've developed and integrate it with good quality medical and training care."

As someone who is passionate about exercise, I'm particularly excited about Dr. Buhler's methods, because, invariably, when you participate in an aggressive exercise program you're bound to become injured at some point. Injuries and resulting chronic pain is also what typically ends a professional athlete's career, but it can certainly put a damper on anyone's quality of life.

History of the AMI Technique

How the AMIT therapy was developed is an interesting story in and of itself. It began with Dr. George Goodheart, a chiropractic physician from Detroit, Michigan, who developed a technique called applied kinesiology, and Dr. Allan Beardall, also a chiropractor.

"Dr. Goodheart discovered the relationships between organs and glands, muscles, and the vertebral levels in the spine," Dr. Buhler explains. "Dr. Allan Beardall studied with Goodheart. Allan was nationally ranked distance runner, so he treated a lot of elite distance runners. Dr. Beardall found that elite athletes would come in with various types of injuries, and he would apply the chiropractic techniques he learned and the applied kinesiology techniques that he learned.

A lot of the conditions got better, but others didn't. Or they'd get better until the athlete would through a certain mileage, and then they'd breakdown again. He said, "You know, there's got to be a reason why they breakdown."

Dr. Beardall launched into an in-depth clinical research project, in which he studied the available chiropractic techniques to determine where, when and why they worked, or did not work. Then, he added acupuncture into the mix, which brought it to a whole new level.

"He defined reflex systems for 310 muscles in the body. At that time, Goodheart had discovered reflexes for about 85 muscles," Dr. Buhler says. "Allan took Dr. Goodheart's work and expanded it dramatically. He redefined anatomy.

We defined divisions to muscle. Like the quadriceps: they are considered four muscles, but in reality there are 12 divisions to those complex muscle systems. He had developed ways of isolating and testing those muscles, so we could go through [a person] and isolate every single muscle in their body to determine whether they're neurologically and proprioceptively intact or not. We can find areas of instability, which show us where a person's vulnerabilities to injuries are, and that allows us to predict where injuries will occur."

Getting to the Root of the Problem is the Hallmark of any Successful Therapy

One of the reason why Dr. Buhler's AMIT therapy is so profound is because it integrates so many effective techniques. Essentially, it incorporates the most effective techniques from chiropractic or acupuncture and other modalities for any given problem or area of your body.

One of the key discoveries was that if your muscle is overloaded beyond its ability to handle the stress placed upon it, either due to lack of conditioning or trauma, a couple of different things occur: Either you may tear the tissue, and/or your nervous system will deactivate the muscle through a series of reflexes called proprioceptors.

Your muscle system and nervous system relate to each other from within tiny muscle fibers called spindle cells, which monitor stretch. If your muscle is overloaded too rapidly, the spindle cells will temporarily inhibit the muscle. The next time you contract the muscle, it will fire again. Similarly, cells within your tendons called Golgi tendon organs also measure and monitor stretch. If your tendon is stretched too rapidly or exceeds its integrity, the Golgi tendon organs will temporarily inhibit the muscle. But the next time the muscle fires, it will again fire appropriately.
"But there's a fail-safe system," Dr. Buhler explains. "It's where the tendon attaches into the periosteum of the bone and the little fibers there are called Sharpey's fibers. Those fibers are loaded with little receptors that monitor tension. And if those fibers are exceeded, then they inhibit the muscle, just like a circuit breaker would inhibit an electrical circuit.

Once that happens, the muscle will still fire under passive range of motion. But if you load the muscle, it gives way. If you continue to load the muscle, your body creates pain at the attachment points to protect you. What the central nervous system does at that point is compute an adaptive strategy by throwing stress into the muscle next to it. Other tissues begin to take on more of the load for the muscle that's been injured."

When other tissues and muscles take over to protect the injured site, this adaptation "locks" into your neurology, which leads to altered or adapted movement patterns. Essentially, it alters how you move and use your body. While this takes stress off the injured muscle, allowing it to heal, the adapted muscle is at a mechanical disadvantage, making it more prone to injury. So that muscle then becomes the next site of injury. This can set into motion a vicious cycle of progressive injuries, cascading out from the original source.

Now, when a muscle has become neurologically and proprioceptively inhibited due to injury, it loses its ability to inhibit its antagonist, so the antagonist muscle remains tight through all planes of motion and never completely releases. A typical example of this is chronic hamstring problems, which is the result of the quadriceps becoming inhibited.

"When people come in with hamstring problems, invariably, I find a group of the quadriceps shut down," Dr. Buhler says. "Once I reactivate [the quadriceps muscle], they get off the table, the hamstrings are clear, and they're no longer having problems with tight hamstrings."

Dr. Buhler echoes my own sentiments when he says that getting to the core problem is essential, as treating the adaptation, the symptom, will never allow for recovery. When you focus on the root of the problem, you can achieve dramatic change and healing.

Description of a Typical AMIT Session

A typical AMIT session begins with taking an in-depth case history — when and how the injury occurred, along with your health and medical history. This provides insight into the potential "layering" or cascade effect caused by your original injury, and the potential sources of your problem.

Next, a full assessment of basic muscle function is done, which also helps establish the functionality of your central nervous system. As explained by Dr. Buhler, the atlas-axis-occiput complex, which is the upper part of your spine affects the brain stem of your central nervous system directly. Starting from your head, each muscle is isolated to determine its neurological integrity. This is done using a form of muscle testing.

"I'm not testing for strength, which would be seen in break testing and which a lot of physical therapists and chiropractors do. What I'm looking for is the tonal quality of that muscle," Dr. Buhler explains.

Next comes the actual therapy process, which he refers to as an "innate guided systems approach." What this means is that your body creates symptoms, such as pain, as a way of communicating that there's a problem.

"We've learned through our conditioning that we just ignore the pain, or we take a medication to suppress the pain, which is no more than saying to the body, 'Shut up. I don't want to hear about it,' which allows the problem to become more advanced," he says. "When you take anti-inflammatories and pain pills for a condition that you're dealing with athletically, all that you do is set the body up for more damage, because you override the protective mechanism of your body. This approach honors your body, listens to your body, and uses symptoms as a communication system."

Once range of motion has been reestablished, yoga or some other form of training program designed to strengthen the previously inhibited muscle can bring you to a whole new level of performance. Naturally, this is particularly valuable for professional athletes.

"We've dropped the time of a 5,000-meter speed skater by a minute and a half, simply by clearing the cap muscles and the quadriceps. That was done in 24 hours," Dr. Buhler says. "And we've increased vertical jump on a basketball player by seven inches in 24 hours, simply by reactivating the quads and the cap muscles. That's staggering. That's unheard of. But it's an example of what happens when you reactivate and reinitialize those muscles back into the nervous system. It's pretty dramatic."

An Example of How AMIT Can Work "Like Magic"

A good example of how Dr. Buhler's method can achieve results akin to "magic," is the technique he uses for sprained ankles, an injury caused by a sudden sideways or twisting movement of your foot. Typically, a severely sprained ankle can take you out of commission for several weeks. Dr. Buhler's manipulation technique can get you back on your feet in a matter of minutes.

There are three grades of severe ankle sprain.

Grade 1: Overstretched ligament
Grade 2: Slight partial ligament tear
Grade 3: Complete ligament tear

According to Dr. Buhler, grade 1and 2 sprained ankles are "an easy fix." Unfortunately, the standard medical approach is to keep weight off the ankle for at least a week, using crutches. The second week, standard treatment typically includes some passive range of motion therapy. After that, you slowly start rehabilitating with more aggressive therapy. Recovery can take four to six weeks.

Dr. Buhler's model looks at this type of injury in a wholly different light. An inversion sprain, which is the most common, occurs when the talus bone — the top bone in your ankle — rotates and the heel bone counter-rotates. This causes the long bone on the outside of your ankle called the fibula to drop inferior and shift backwards at the attachment in your knee. That changes the dynamic of your joint mechanoreceptors, causing severe pain when you put any weight on the joints.

"The lateral stabilizers to the ankle muscle become inhibited because of the trauma. They no longer fire to support the joint. Every time you take a step, you're stepping and weight-bearing on a joint that's distorted and unstable, and your body automatically creates pain to protect you," Dr. Buhler explains. "You get the swelling, because the capillary hemorrhages. Your body again is having to deal with the inflammatory process and needs to begin the healing process."

To address this, the technique calls for adjusting the ankle mortise back into alignment, so the joint tracksproperly. He then resets the lateral stabilizer muscles with a specific reflex method. In the beginning, when the muscles are challenged, they will be weak and painful. But, once they've been activated, upon retesting they are once again solid and pain free, and can withstand weight bearing.

"Now, when the athlete or the patient gets off the table and begins to walk, the first step is painful, the second step is less painful, and each subsequent step they take is less and less painful, to where they can run back and forth in the clinic without any pain. That way, walking and running actually becomes therapeutic, because you're stimulating the lymphatic drainage system," he says.

Summary of the Advanced Muscle Integration Technique (AMIT)

As explained by Dr. Buhler, each muscle in your body has the following points or reflexes that relate to it. All of these points or reflexes must be stimulated. When a muscle is inhibited, the corresponding reflexes will become painful.

Eight reflexes
One acupuncture point
Two organ and gland reflex points
Origin insertion of the muscle
Three reflexes in the spine, two of which are reactive

Dr. Buhler explains the process of testing and treating the muscle using these reflex points:

"A person will wake up one morning with pain on L5 or elbow, and it really hurts. They don't remember hitting themselves, but it's painful. They go to the doctor. They're diagnosed with epicondylitis or tennis elbow, and prescribed an anti-inflammatory. Well, that point may be an acupuncture point related to a muscle in the opposite knee," Dr. Buhler says. "As we go through the therapy and we stimulate those reflex points, they are quite painful. People are kind of shocked at the fact that I can precisely isolate those painful spots. 'How did you know I hurt there? I've been hurting there for six weeks, and you nailed it,' they'll say. You go through that process of reactivating all those reflexes, and then you go back and retest the muscle for function. It's not a comfortable procedure, but it's effective."

Other Techniques Integrated into Dr. Buhler's Therapy

Dr. Buhler also integrates other techniques and modalities into his work, such as:

The Nasal Specific Technique: Developed by Dr. Stober, a dual-licensed naturopathic physician and chiropractic physician with a practice in Portland, Oregon. The technique is based on manipulation of your skull sutures. They claim the bones of your skull fuse, but this is incorrect. Your cranium actually expands and rotates with each breath, and this movement is tied into your cerebral spinal fluid.

Dr. Stober uses the technique in the treatment of children with Down syndrome, muscular dystrophy, sinus problems, migraine headaches, concussions, and Meniere's disease. One of the techniques involves inserting a small balloon, the size of your little finger, into the nasal passage, where it is inflated and released a number of times on each side. This tends to expand your cranium from the inside out, unlocking those suture lines, and reestablishing the cranial mechanism.
Network Spinal Analysis: Developed by Donny Epstein, this technique involves toggling and adjusting your atlas with very light-contact adjustment.

Epstein's position is that when you experience emotional stress and trauma, your central nervous system goes into a state of contraction. Surrounding your brain and spinal cord is the meningeal system. This tissue is attaches via tiny ligaments called dentate ligaments to the base of your spine and upper cervical spine. In response to emotional stress and trauma, the meningeal system contracts, pulling those dentate ligaments, which can distort the vertebra from inside your spinal canal.

Regular meningeal adjustments aren't as effective to address this kind of distortion. But what Epstein discovered was that by lightly holding specific points on the sacrum and different parts of the spine, the central nervous system begins to release that meningeal tension.

More Information

To learn more, see Dr. Buhler's website, http://www.AMITMethod.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. It includes information on each of the techniques, along with testimonials from the likes of John Stockton, Picabo Street and others. There, you can also find a list of providers around the United States that have been trained in these techniques.

Unfortunately there are only a dozen clinicians across the country who are trained in his technique, but Dr. Buhler is planning on training more clinicians in the near future. I was fortunate enough to be treated by Dr. Buhler for a few sessions and finished up with Dr. Maria Hoffameir for a few months to finish my treatment.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

Post by BroJones »

Dr Mercola talks about Bee-propolis, turmeric, and the dangers of chemotherapy. IOW, alternative treatment for CANCER.

He also speaks of the value of switching the body to fat-burning mode.
The Latest Weapon in the War on Cancer: Honey Bees
November 24, 2012

By Dr. Mercola

Propolis, the "caulk" honeybees use to patch holes in their hives, has been used as a natural remedy since ancient times, treating ills ranging from sore throats and burns to allergies.

New research has revealed another exciting use for this seemingly miraculous substance, this time in the fight against cancer.

Propolis Slows Tumor Growth

Propolis has a number of well-known therapeutic properties, including potent antioxidant and anti-microbial action, and healing, analgesic, anesthetic, and anti-inflammatory properties. In the hive, bees use it as a disinfectant against bacteria and viruses, helping to seal cracks and "embalm" invaders that are too large to carry out.

It's been used for thousands of years in folk medicine, but despite its plethora of active components, research on this compound, and therefore its modern medical uses, is limited.

Researchers from the University of Chicago Medical Center, intrigued by propolis' anti-cancer potential, decided to look at one of its bioactive components, caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE), and its impact on human prostate cancer cells.

In cells grown in a lab, even small doses of CAPE slowed the growth of tumor cells. And when low oral doses were given to mice with prostate tumors, tumor growth slowed by 50 percent! What's more, feeding CAPE to mice daily caused the tumors to stop growing, although they returned when the CAPE was removed from their diets.


This suggests the propolis compound works by impacting signaling networks that control cancerous cell growth, rather than by killing the cells directly. However, there are at least four studies on propolis' apoptotic properties, indicating that technically it is capable of directly killing cancer cells, including prostate cancer, melanoma and more, as well.1

This is not the first time propolis has shown promise in treating cancer. In 2009, propolis was found to suppress the growth of neurofibromatosis-associated tumors (tumors on nerve tissue) by blocking PAK1 signaling. Researchers noted:2

"Since more than 70% of human cancers such as breast and prostate cancers require the kinase PAK1 for their growth, it is quite possible that GPE [green propolis extract] could be potentially useful for the treatment of these cancers, as is Bio 30 [a CAPE-based propolis extract]."

Propolis Has Powerful Immune-Modulating, Anti-Inflammatory Properties

What makes natural compounds so exciting, and often so powerful, is that they don't simply exhibit one therapeutic action the way, say, most drugs work. Instead, they contain numerous bioactive components that may exert dozens of beneficial actions within your body. This appears to be the case with propolis, which has been found to play a role in over 80 conditions, including:3
Inflammation Ulcers Radiation damage
Herpes Warts Periodontitis
Ear infections Respiratory tract infections Flu
Cataracts Oxidative stress Staph infection



Writing in Clinical Reviews in Allergy and Immunology, researchers expanded on some of propolis' potential effects:4

"Propolis, a waxy substance produced by the honeybee, has been adopted as a form of folk medicine since ancient times. It has a wide spectrum of alleged applications including potential anti-infection and anticancer effects. Many of the therapeutic effects can be attributed to its immunomodulatory functions. The composition of propolis can vary according to the geographic locations from where the bees obtained the ingredients.

Two main immunopotent chemicals have been identified as caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE) and artepillin C. Propolis, CAPE, and artepillin C have been shown to exert summative immunosuppressive function on T lymphocyte subsets but paradoxically activate macrophage function.

On the other hand, they also have potential antitumor properties by different postulated mechanisms such as suppressing cancer cells proliferation via its anti-inflammatory effects; decreasing the cancer stem cell populations; blocking specific oncogene signaling pathways; exerting antiangiogenic effects; and modulating the tumor microenvironment.

The good bioavailability by the oral route and good historical safety profile makes propolis an ideal adjuvant agent for future immunomodulatory or anticancer regimens."


Protein Intake Also Crucial for Cancers

Earlier this month I interviewed Dr. Ron Rosedale for several hours. He is one of the first physicians in the U.S. that started measuring leptin levels clinically and was far ahead of the curve on this one. In our interview, he helped me understand the major importance that excessive protein intake can have on cancer growth.

The mTOR pathway is short for mammalian target of rapamycin. This pathway is ancient but relatively recently appreciated and has only been known for less than 20 years. Odds are very high your doctor was never taught this is medical school and isn't even aware of it. Many new cancer drugs are actually being targeted to use this pathway. Drugs using this pathway have also been given to animals to radically extend their lifespan. But you don't have to use drugs to get this pathway to work for you.

You can biohack your body and merely restrict your protein intake and replace the decreased protein with healthy fats as this will provide virtually identical benefits as these dangerous and expensive drugs.

Eating excessive protein can be an additional synergistically powerful mechanism. Dr. Rosedale believes that when you consume protein in levels higher than one gram of protein per kilogram of LEAN body mass you can activate the mTOR pathway, which will radically increase your risk of cancers. It is very easy to consume excess protein and my guess is that most people reading this are. I know I was, and as a result of this new insight I have reduced my protein intake by about half.

To determine your lean body mass find out your percent body fat and subtract from 100. So if you are 20% body fat you would have 80% lean body mass. Just multiply that times your current weight to get lean body mass. For most people this means restricting protein intake from 35 to 75 grams. Pregnant women and those working out extensively need about 25% more protein though.

Of course when you reduce protein you need to replace it with other calories, so the key is to replace the lost calories with high-quality fats such as avocados, butter, coconut oil, olives, olive oil, nuts and eggs. It is also very helpful to avoid eating anything for three hours before going to bed as this allows you to have relatively low blood sugars while you are sleeping. This is another good trick to move your body to fat burning mode.

Nearly everyone is primarily in carb burning mode because of the amount of carbohydrate content that they consume. The beauty of shifting over to fat burning mode is that it virtually eliminates hunger. Intermittent fasting is one way to help achieve this, but radically cutting back on non-vegetable carbs is also very important. Coconut oil is particularly useful to use in making the transition to fat burning mode as it is primarily short and medium chain fats which break down very quickly and can be used as an energy source which is important for countering the decreased energy and other physical challenges that many encounter in the several weeks it typically takes to make the transition to fat burning mode .

Other Natural Remedies Also Show Cancer Promise

One of the reasons why conventional cancer treatment is such a dismal failure in the United States is because it relies on chemotherapy. Chemotherapy drugs are, by their very nature, extremely toxic and typically work against your body's natural ability to fight cancer, e.g. destroying host immunity instead of supporting it.

One of the biggest drawbacks to chemotherapy is the fact that it destroys healthy cells throughout your body right along with cancer cells, a "side effect" that often leads to accelerated death, not healing.


Another devastating side effect of chemotherapy is the way it actually supports the more chemo-resistant and malignant cell subpopulations within tumors (e.g. cancer stem cells), both killing the more benign cells and/or quiescent cells within the tumor that keep it slow-growing, or even harmless.

As a result, this unleashes a more aggressive, treatment-resistant type of cancer to wreak havoc on your body.

Like propolis, a handful of natural compounds have been discovered that show promise for treating cancer without such toxic effects. Some of these even exhibit an effect called "selective cytotoxicity," which means they are able to kill cancer cells while leaving healthy cells and tissue unharmed, and even benefited one such compound is bromelain, an enzyme that can be extracted from pineapple stems. Research published in the journal Planta Medica found that bromelain was superior to the chemotherapy drug 5-fluorauracil in treating cancer in an animal study .5

Researchers stated:

"This antitumoral effect [of bromelain] was superior to that of 5-FU [5-fluorouracil], whose survival index was approximately 263 %, relative to the untreated control."


What makes this impact particularly impressive is that the bromelain worked without causing additional harm to the animals. The chemo drug 5-fluorauracil, on the other hand, has a relatively unsuccessful and dangerous track record despite being used for nearly 40 years. Selective cytotoxicity is indeed a property that is only found among natural compounds; no chemotherapy drug yet developed is capable of this effect. Aside from bromelain, other examples of natural compounds that have been found to kill cancer cells without harming healthy cells include:

Vitamin C: Dr. Ronald Hunninghake carried out a 15-year research project called RECNAC (cancer spelled backwards). His groundbreaking research in cell cultures showed that vitamin C was selectively cytotoxic against cancer cells.
Eggplant extract: Solasodine rhamnosyl glycosides (BEC), which are a class of compounds extracted from plants of the Solanaceae family, such as eggplant, tomato, potato, Bell peppers, and tobacco, can also impact only cancerous cells leaving normal cells alone. Eggplant extract cream appears to be particularly useful in treating skin cancer . Dr. Bill E. Cham, a leading researcher in this area, explains:

"The mode of action of SRGs [glycoalkaloids solasodine rhamnosy glycosides (BEC)] is unlike any current antineoplastic [anti-tumor] agent. Specific receptors for the SRGs present only on cancer cells but not normal cells are the first step of events that lead to apoptosis in cancer cells only, and this may explain why during treatment the cancer cells were being eliminated and normal cells were replacing the killed cancer cells with no scar tissue being formed."

Turmeric (Curcumin Extract): Of all the natural cancer fighters out there, this spice has been the most intensely researched for exhibiting selective cytotoxicity.6 Remarkably, in a 2011 study published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, rats administered curcumin, the primary polyphenol in turmeric, saw a decrease in experimentally-induced brain tumors in 9 out of 11 treated, while noting that the curcumin did not affect the viability of brain cells "suggesting that curcumin selectively targets the transformed [cancerous] cells ."7


Natural Strategies for Cancer Prevention

When it comes to cancer and other chronic diseases, effective prevention trumps progressive treatments in my eyes. I believe you can virtually eliminate your risk of ever developing cancer (and radically improve your chances of recovering from cancer if you currently have it) by following some relatively simple risk reduction strategies — all of which help promote a healthful biological environment in which your cells can thrive and combat disease naturally.

Optimize your vitamin D levels.
Reduce or eliminate your processed food, fructose and grain carbohydrate intake.
Control your fasting insulin and leptin levels. Normalizing your insulin levels is one of the most powerful physical actions you can take to lower your risk of cancer, and improved insulin and leptin control is the natural outcome of reducing or eliminating fructose, grains, and processed foods from your diet.
Normalize your ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats by taking a high-quality krill oil and reducing your intake of most processed vegetable oils.
Get regular exercise. One of the primary ways exercise lowers your risk for cancer is by reducing elevated insulin levels, which creates a low sugar environment that discourages the growth and spread of cancer cells, which thrive on sugar-based metabolism (anaerobic glycolysis). Controlling insulin levels is one of the most powerful ways to reduce your cancer risks. Additionally, exercise improves the circulation of immune cells in your blood. Your immune system is your first line of defense against everything from minor illnesses like a cold right up to devastating, life-threatening diseases like cancer.

The trick about exercise, though, is understanding how to use it as a precise tool. This ensures you are getting enough to achieve the benefit, not too much to cause injury, and the right variety to balance your entire physical structure and maintain strength and flexibility, and aerobic and anaerobic fitness levels. If you have limited time, high-intensity Peak Fitness exercises are your best bet but ideally you should have a good strength-training program as well.
Get regular, good-quality sleep .
Reduce your exposure to environmental toxins like pesticides, household chemical cleaners, synthetic air fresheners and air pollution.
Limit your exposure and provide protection for yourself from EMF produced by cell phone towers, base stations, cell phones and WiFi stations. On May 31, 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared that cell phones are "possibly carcinogenic to humans."
Avoid frying or charbroiling your food. Boil, poach or steam your foods instead.
Have a tool to permanently reprogram the neurological short-circuiting that can activate cancer genes. Even the CDC states that 85 percent of disease is caused by emotions. It is likely that this factor may be more important than all the other physical ones listed here, so make sure this is addressed. Energy psychology seems to be one of the best approaches and my particular favorite tool, as you may know, is the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) .
Eat at least one-third of your diet in the form of raw food.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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How Big Pharma "buys" scientific evidence, manipulating the "beaucoup-bucks" medical profession
How Drug Company Money is Undermining Science
December 06, 2012

By Dr. Mercola

When it comes to making health care decisions, which can deeply impact your life, you need access to truthful, unbiased information and science, or at least access to a physician who does.

Yet true, independent research -- the foundation upon which the modern medical system is supposed to be based -- is becoming an increasingly rare commodity … if it's not already extinct.

In a scathing expose in Scientific American,1 journalism professor Charles Seife shows very clearly how the pharmaceutical industry is funneling money to prominent research scientists conducting studies on their products, and no one – not the researchers, not their funding sources, not scientific institutions and not even the government – appears able (or willing) to stop it.

Massive Conflicts of Interest are Ruining Medical Science

It's well known that studies funded by industry or conducted by researchers with industry ties tend to favor corporate interests. That's why it probably comes as no surprise that many so-called "experts" are very much on the drug industry's payroll -- but they masquerade as independent medical experts or even state officials during their "day jobs."

It is, by the way, 100% legal for drug companies to pay medical professionals to promote their products.

The conflict of interest within this practice is obvious, which is why the drug industry often keeps quiet on their actual payments, as do the medical professionals involved. Although many medical, educational and research institutions require faculty members to disclose such potential conflicts of interest, many do not actively monitor employees' activities.

Seife writes:

"The entanglements between researchers and pharmaceutical companies take many forms. There are speakers bureaus: a drugmaker gives a researcher money to travel — often first class — to gigs around the country, where the researcher sometimes gives a company-written speech and presents company-drafted slides.

There is ghostwriting: a pharmaceutical manufacturer has an article drafted and pays a scientist (the 'guest author') an honorarium to put his or her name on it and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. And then there is consulting: a company hires a researcher to render advice.

Researchers 'think what these companies are after are their brains, but they're really after the brand,' says Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. 'To buy a distinguished, senior academic researcher, the kind of person who speaks at meetings, who writes textbooks, who writes journal articles — that's worth 100,000 salespeople.'"

Are You Receiving Medical Advice That's Been Tainted by Drug Company Money?

If you've visited a physician lately, the answer is quite likely "yes." You see, the compromised research doesn't simply stay in the medical journals … it often gets translated into your medical care. It is based on these purportedly scientific results that drugs get approved and public health recommendations are made.

Take Avandia, the diabetes drug that is now known to have killed tens of thousands of people and significantly increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. Research from the Mayo Clinic revealed that 90 percent of scientists who wrote favorable articles about the drug had financial ties to GlaxoSmithKline, the drug's maker.2 A committee of independent experts still recommended that Avandia remain on the market, despite its clear risks, and a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight board voted 8 to 7 to accept the advice.

Well, "it came out that members of the committee, too, had been taking money from drug companies," Seife reported.

This is, of course, but one example. There are, unfortunately, countless others. Eight of the nine doctors on the panel that developed the 2004 cholesterol guidelines, which are still in use today, had been making money from the drug companies that manufacture statin cholesterol-lowering drugs -- wouldn't you know it, the same drugs the new guidelines suddenly created a dramatically larger market for in the United States.

Researchers and certainly those who sit on government panels are supposed to disclose these types of relationships with the drug industry, but they often don't and little is done about it. According to the investigative report:

"Several layers of checking are supposed to ensure that conflicts of interest are caught and exposed even when an oblivious or dishonest researcher does not report them. When a scientist fails to report such a conflict, the university or hospital he or she works for is supposed to spot it and report it. And when a university or hospital is not doing its job catching conflicted research, then the government agency that funds most of that research — the National Institutes of Health — is supposed to step in.

Unfortunately, that backup system is badly broken. "Institutions often look the other way, or they have policies in place that are quite weak," says Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor in Georgetown University's department of pharmacology and physiology."

The NIH May be One of the Worst Offenders...

Government funding is supposed to be neutral -- an independent source from which unbiased scientific research can be drawn. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is actually the second-highest funding source for drug studies (first is the drug companies, themselves). Many assume NIH-funded studies are unbiased and funded strictly through taxpayer dollars, but NIH accepts a great deal of money from Big Pharma and is deeply enmeshed with the industry.

For instance, two leaders from the NIH — Gary Nabel, one of the NIH's most prominent researchers in the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and Elias Zerhouni, former director of the entire NIH) recently switched sides to work for Big Pharma (specifically, Sanofi). So this might help explain why Seife uncovered that several individuals working on NIH advisory committees were granted waivers exempting them from ethics laws (even though they had received thousands of dollars from drug companies, which were not disclosed on the waivers).

In the fall of 2003, the NIH -- with Zerhouni at its head – also faced grave accusations when it came to light that hundreds of its scientists had financial ties to the medical and pharmaceutical industries. According to a 2004 article in the NIH Record, over 100 scientists did not get approval for their industry activities, even though the rules were so loose virtually all requests to conduct outside work were approved by the agency, without any limits on compensation or hours worked for outside entities.

The NIH is not unique in these ties. Joining a parade of other high-ranking government officials who passed through the revolving doors between government and Big Pharma, in January 2010 Julie Gerberding, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which makes the U.S. immunization schedule, became the president of Merck's vaccine unit, which makes 14 of the 17 pediatric vaccines recommended by the CDC, and 9 of the 10 recommended for adults.

Even Your Physician May be on the Drug Industry's Payroll

I suspect many Americans would be surprised to learn that many thousands of doctors, researchers and other medical experts – some of whom you probably depend on to provide unbiased information and advice pertaining to your health care – receive large amounts of supplemental income from drug companies, but it is reality nonetheless.

In many cases, these individuals do not believe the relationship influences their medical advice, research or prescribing habits -- although clearly the drug industry would not continue devoting millions of dollars to this type of marketing if it did not pay off. But even prominent researchers and expert physicians are often being influenced by the industry, whether they realize it or not.

I speak from experience because, in fact, I used to be one of those lecturers. I was hired as a "rising star" shortly after I finished my residency training in 1985 and flew across the country lecturing on estrogen replacement therapy, and receiving handsome checks from the drug companies for doing so.

I stopped this nearly 30 years ago when I realized that the entire approach was a scam. Fifteen years later all the major studies came out showing that estrogen replacement therapy radically increased heart disease and cancer, and did not prevent it like the drug industry's manipulated studies suggested.

Currently there are tens of thousands of U.S. physicians and researchers who have replaced my lecturing role and are currently on Big Pharma's payroll. An ongoing investigation by ProPublica3 revealed that 12 drug companies paid $761.3 million to physicians for consulting, speaking, research and other expenses in 2009, 2010 and, for some, the beginning of 2011 -- and that represents only the disclosed payments. In all actuality, this figure is probably far too low.

More Transparency in the Medical Field is Coming in 2013

Thanks to the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which starts in 2013, drug companies and medical device manufacturers will be required to reveal most of the money they are giving to physicians. Starting in 2013, you will be able to determine if a health care provider you trust is actually on the drug industry's payroll, thanks to the new federal law, which mandates the following:

Drug and medical device companies will be required to report and disclose all payments (including stock options, research grants, knickknacks, consulting fees, travel expenses and more) to physicians (March 2013). Unfortunately, payments to nurses, physician assistants, and other medical professionals will not have to be disclosed
The information will be displayed in an online government database that you will be able to search (September 2013)

In the meantime, you can search ProPublica's database4 to see the disclosed payments made to physicians in your state. Many of the most prestigious universities, including Harvard, are now banning their staff from receiving money from drug companies for speaking, and this new disclosure requirement will hopefully push more institutions in that direction.

Breaking the drug industry's stranglehold on the conventional medical industry will not be easy -- after all, the drug industry spends nearly twice as much on promotion5 as it does on research and development – but increasing numbers of people are now waking up to these harsh realities, and that is instrumental in getting the tide to turn. You, being among those who are informed, can help share this knowledge with others. More than 1.5 million people receive this newsletter, and together we can make a huge difference.

The ultimate goal is to have a critical mass of people refuse the unnecessarily dangerous and counterproductive solutions currently offered by conventional medicine, as this will be the powerful stimulus to generate authentic change. You can also act now, on a personal level, by making the necessary lifestyle changes that will allow you to take control of your health, instead of leaving it in the hands of the drug industry who has likely manipulated and deceived the physician you are consulting with.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Today's note from Dr Mercola -- OIL PULLING using Coconut oil especially.
Don't know what that is? read on!

I know some of you guys have been heralding oil pulling for months; well finally --
I'm going to try it.
December 08, 2012 | 80,745 views |


By Dr. Mercola

Coconuts are among the most nutritionally dense foods on the planet and have been a dietary staple for millennia. Western science is now "playing catch-up" to what natives of tropical regions have known for thousands of years. One of the reasons coconut is so special is that it's a natural antimicrobial food.

Coconut, especially its oil, is a powerful destroyer of all kinds of microbes, from viruses to bacteria to protozoa, many of which harm human health.

Researchers at the Athlone Institute of Technology's Bioscience Research Institute in Ireland set out to test coconut oil's biocidal properties against the bacteria responsible for tooth decay.

Dental caries is a commonly overlooked problem affecting 60 to 90 percent of children and the majority of adults in industrialized countries, according to chief researcher Dr. Damien Brady. His research team tested the antibacterial action of coconut oil in its natural state and coconut oil that had been treated with enzymes, in a process similar to digestion.

The oils were tested against strains of Streptococcus bacteria, which are common inhabitants of your mouth.

They found that enzyme-modified coconut oil strongly inhibits the growth of most strains of Streptococcus bacteria, including Streptococcus mutans, an acid-producing bacterium that is a major cause of tooth decay1. It is thought that the breaking down of the fatty coconut oil by the enzymes turns it into acids, which are toxic to certain bacteria.2 Enzyme-modified coconut oil was also harmful to the yeast Candida albicans, which can cause thrush.

Dr. Brady said:

"Incorporating enzyme-modified coconut oil into dental hygiene products would be an attractive alternative to chemical additives, particularly as it works at relatively low concentrations. Also, with increasing antibiotic resistance, it is important that we turn our attention to new ways to combat microbial infection."

The work also contributes to our understanding of antibacterial activity in the human gut, which helps maintain the balanced flora necessary for a strong immune system.

"Our data suggests that products of human digestion show antimicrobial activity. This could have implications for how bacteria colonize the cells lining the digestive tract and for overall gut health," explained Dr. Brady.

The Many Health Benefits of Coconut Oil

Coconut oil offers an impressive array of health benefits. In addition to its antimicrobial properties, coconut oil is beneficial for:

Promoting heart health
Supporting proper thyroid function
Strengthening your immune system
Providing an excellent "fuel" for your body and supporting a strong metabolism
Maintaining healthy and youthful looking skin


One of the primary reasons coconut oil's benefits are so broad is that 50 percent of the fat in coconut oil is lauric acid, which is rarely found in nature. In fact, coconut oil contains the most lauric acid of any substance on Earth. Your body converts lauric acid into monolaurin, a monoglyceride that can actually destroy lipid-coated viruses such as HIV and herpes, influenza, measles, gram-negative bacteria, and protozoa such as giardia lamblia.

Another of coconut oil's antimicrobial components is capric acid, present in lesser amounts.

Coconut oil is also comprised of medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs), which are smaller than the long chain fatty acids that are much more common to vegetable and seed oils. MCFAs are easily digested and readily cross cell membranes, and are sent directly to your liver, where they are immediately converted into energy rather than stored as fat. Coconut oil is easy on your digestive system and does not produce an insulin spike in your bloodstream.

A Traditional Diet Might Not Guarantee You Perfect Oral Health

In the 1900s, Dr. Weston A. Price did extensive research on the link between oral health and physical diseases. He discovered that the most successful primitive groups health-wise were those who paid attention to and integrated beneficial ancient knowledge and dietary wisdom into their lives. The difference, Price reasoned, between primitive cultures who were healthy and those who were diseased came not from solely eating a traditional diet (as they all did), but in the accumulated wisdom enjoyed by certain populations, which allowed them to enjoy optimal health.

One of the keys to oral health is eating a traditional diet rich in fresh, unprocessed vegetables, nuts, and grass-fed meats that are in line with your genetic ancestry. However, as beneficial as that diet is to your dental and overall health, it might not be enough to guarantee perfect oral health.

We know, of course, that eating junk food and sugar certainly causes and worsens dental decay in humans, but there must be more to the story. There is evidence of tooth decay in ancient populations, long before there was exposure to refined sugar and white flour, as well as among wild animals today. Even some dolphins, which generally eat no carbohydrates whatsoever — only fish, squid, and crustaceans — have problems with tooth decay. Clearly, simply following a traditional diet is not enough to explain this phenomenon, or else there would be no dental decay in ancient peoples or wildlife.

Plaque-Busting Strategy No. 1: Fermented Vegetables

In the past, I was also challenged with plaque accumulation which resulted in my having to make monthly visits to the dental hygienist. It seemed no amount of brushing, flossing, and even using a dental irrigator diminished this problem. However, in November of 2011, I was introduced to the first of two natural strategies that have significantly improved my plaque problem. The trick? Simply adding healthy amounts of high quality fermented vegetables to my diet.

Fermented vegetables are loaded with friendly flora that not only improve digestion but alter the flora in your mouth as well. Since the addition of these foods into my diet, my plaque has decreased by 50 percent and is much softer. I later further refined my approach by doing oil pulling with coconut oil and learning how to specifically target the primary source of plague, which is the junction of the tooth and gum surface by carefully directing my toothbrush at the appropriate angle.

Download Interview Transcript

Plaque-Busting Strategy No. 2: Oil Pulling

The second technique I've been using for the past year is called "oil pulling" with coconut oil, which has reduced my plaque by another 50 percent, allowing me to go two months between visits to the hygienist, instead of one. Oil pulling is a practice dating back thousands of years, having originated with Ayurvedic medicine. When oil pulling is combined with the antimicrobial power of coconut oil, you have one very powerful health tool.

Sesame oil is traditionally recommended, but it has relatively high concentration of omega-6 oils. Therefore, I believe coconut oil is far superior, and, in my mind, it tastes better. But from a mechanical and biophysical perspective, it is likely that both work.

Oil pulling is simple. Basically, it involves rinsing your mouth with coconut oil, much like you would with a mouthwash. The oil is "worked" around your mouth by pushing, pulling, and drawing it through your teeth for a period of 15 minutes. If you are obsessive like me and want even better results you can go for 30-45 minutes. This process allows the oil to "pull out" bacteria, viruses, fungi and other debris. The best time is in the morning before eating breakfast, but it can be done at any time, the important point is to just do it. I seek to do it twice a day if my schedule allows. The used oil is discarded and your mouth rinsed with water. You should not swallow the oil because it's loaded with bacteria, toxins, pus, and mucous.

When done correctly, oil pulling has a significant cleansing, detoxifying and healing affect, not only for your mouth and sinuses but for the rest of your body as well.

Candida and Streptococcus are common residents in your mouth, and it's these germs and their toxic waste products that cause plaque accumulation and tooth decay, in addition to secondary infections and chronic inflammation throughout your body. Oil pulling can help lessen the overall toxic burden on your immune system by preventing the spread of these organisms from your mouth to the rest of your body, by way of your bloodstream.

The potential benefits of oil pulling extend well beyond your mouth. Oil pullers have reported rapid relief from systemic health problems, such as arthritis, diabetes and heart disease. According to Bruce Fife, naturopathic physician and expert in the healing effects of coconut3, the cleansing effect of oil pulling can be understood with the following analogy:

"It acts much like the oil you put in your car engine. The oil picks up dirt and grime. When you drain the oil, it pulls out the dirt and grime with it, leaving the engine relatively clean. Consequently, the engine runs smoother and lasts longer. Likewise, when we expel harmful substances from our bodies our health is improved and we run smoother and last longer."

Additional Tips for Improving Your Oral Health

Total Video Length: 01:12:05

Download Interview Transcript

Proper dental hygiene is important for optimal health in your mouth and in the rest of your body, as discussed by Dr. Bill Osmunson in the interview above. When it comes to preventing cavities, drinking fluoridated water and brushing your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste is not the answer, because fluoride is more toxic than lead. The key is your diet and proper dental care: good old brushing and flossing. By avoiding sugars and processed foods, you prevent the proliferation of the bacteria that cause decay in the first place.

Practicing twice daily brushing and flossing, along with regular cleanings by your biological dentist and hygienist, will ensure that your teeth and gums are as healthy as they can be. You may want to try oil pulling to enhance your current dental hygiene routine.

In addition to consuming foods that are part of the "traditional diet" and avoiding processed foods and refined sugar, make sure you are getting plenty omega-3 fats. The latest research suggests even moderate amounts of omega-3 fats may help ward off gum disease. My favorite source of high quality omega-3 fat is krill oil.

And speaking of sugar, a particular type of honey from New Zealand called Manuka honey has also been shown to be effective in reducing plaque. Researchers found Manuka honey worked as well as chemical mouthwash — and better than the cavity fighting sugar alcohol, xylitol — in reducing levels of plaque. This is most likely due to the honey's antibacterial properties. Clinical trials have shown that Manuka honey can effectively eradicate more than 250 clinical strains of bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant varieties.

I still believe that oil pulling with coconut oil gives you more bang for your buck for your oral health, but just realize you have natural options to harsh and often toxic chemicals.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

Post by Original_Intent »

Hooray! Dr. Mercola! - having read much of his stuff, I have been surprised he hasn't prmoted oil pulling sooner!

Glad you will be joining us in swishing, Dr. Jones!

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

Post by BroJones »

Thanks, O_I ...

Today -- regarding exercise and aging gracefully... even feeling younger at my age (63).

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... _DNL_art_2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

By Dr. Mercola

If you had a choice and could either age well, enjoying your "golden years" with energy and vigor, free from disability and illness – or age poorly, and be straddled with health issues that keep you from fully living the later years of your life … which would you choose?

You do actually have a choice, or at least can choose to use strategies that will greatly sway your chances in one direction or the other. And I'm sure most everyone reading this would rather experience healthy aging than the alternative…

4 Key Strategies to Ensure Healthy Aging

New research has found four key behaviors that lower your risk of disability, chronic disease and mental health problems as you age.1

Not smoking
Moderate drinking

Exercising regularly (at least 2.5 hours a week of moderate activity or 1 hour a week of vigorous activity)
Eating vegetables and fruits daily

Now here's what's interesting. While each of these was moderately beneficial on its own, increasing the odds of "successful aging" by up to 50 percent, the best rewards came from following all of them simultaneously. Those who practiced all four of these tripled their chances of avoiding disability and disease over a 16-year period, and experienced good cognitive, mental, physical, respiratory, and cardiovascular functioning.

"Although individual healthy behaviors are moderately associated with successful aging, their combined impact is substantial," the researchers said.

6 Additional Healthy Aging Strategies to Add to Your Arsenal

The bottom line is, the more healthy habits you embrace, the higher your chances of aging "successfully" becomes. And while the strategies listed above are all important, there are several others that I believe can benefit most people greatly as well.

1. Avoid Sugar/Fructose

Limiting sugar in your diet is a well-known key to longevity, because of all the molecules capable of inflicting damage in your body, sugar molecules are probably the most damaging of all. Fructose in particular is an extremely potent pro-inflammatory agent that creates toxic advanced glycation end products (AGEs), which are associated with the development of chronic degenerative diseases associated with aging.

Excess fructose consumption also promotes the kind of dangerous growth of fat cells around your vital organs that are the hallmark of diabetes and heart disease. In one study, 16 volunteers who ate high levels of fructose produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs in just 10 weeks!2

Sugar/fructose also increases your insulin and leptin levels and decreases receptor sensitivity for both of these vital hormones, and this is another major factor in premature aging and age-related chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Keep in mind that while it's perfectly normal for your blood sugar levels to rise slightly after every meal, it is not natural or healthy when your blood sugar levels become excessively elevated and stay that way.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what will happen if you're eating like the average American, who consumes a staggering 2.5 pounds of sugar a week on average! And when you add in other low-quality carb foods such as pastries, cookies, candy and starchy "complex carbs" such as bread and pasta, which also break down to sugar (glucose) in your body, it's not so difficult to see why so many Americans are in such poor health.

Further, according to Professor Cynthia Kenyon, whom many experts believe should win the Nobel Prize for her research into aging, carbohydrates (glucose) directly affect the genes that govern youthfulness and longevity. So, you may actually be able to extend your life and stay fit throughout your old age with a simple dietary change that switches on your "youth" gene.

Kenyon's research with C. elegans roundworms showed that decreased carb intake can lead to significant life extension and improved long-term health. One of the most interesting details of her findings is that not only did the roundworms live up to SIX TIMES longer than normal, but they kept their health and youthful vigor until the end—and isn't that what "healthy aging" is really all about?

As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day. However, most people would be wise to limit their fructose to 15 grams or less, particularly if you have elevated uric acid levels, which can be used as an indicator of fructose toxicity. (For more information on this, please see this recent article.)

2. High Intensity "Anti-Aging" Exercise like Peak Fitness

Even if you're eating the healthiest diet in the world, you still need to exercise to reach the highest levels of health, and you need to be exercising effectively, which means including high-intensity activities into your rotation. A recent study published in the journal Mechanisms of Aging and Development3 confirmed the "anti-aging" effect of high-intensity training, such as Peak Fitness.

High-intensity interval-type training also gives a natural boost to your human growth hormone (HGH) production, which is essential for optimal health, strength and vigor.
I've discussed the importance of Peak Fitness for your health on numerous occasions, so for more information, please review this previous article.

3. Stress Reduction and Positive Thinking

You cannot be optimally healthy if you avoid addressing the emotional component of your health and longevity, as your emotional state plays a role in nearly every physical disease -- from heart disease and depression, to arthritis and cancer. It's simply no coincidence that many centenarians mention positive thought and emotional wellness in their advice on how to stay healthy. As 114-year-old Walter Breuning said before his death:

"Tell yourself that every day is a good day, and make it that way."

Effective coping mechanisms are a major longevity-promoting factor in part because stress has a direct impact on inflammation, which in turn underlies many of the chronic diseases that kill people prematurely every day. Meditation, prayer, social support and exercise are all viable options that can help you maintain emotional and mental equilibrium. I also strongly believe in using simple tools such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) to address deeper, oftentimes hidden, emotional problems.

4. Take High-Quality Animal-Based Omega-3 Fats

Animal-based omega-3 fat is a strong factor in helping people live longer, and many experts believe that it is likely the predominant reason why the Japanese are the longest lived race on the planet (as their diets are naturally high in omega-3s). In the United States, many are deficient in omega-3 fats.

According to Dr. William Harris, an expert on omega-3 fats, those who have an omega-3 index of less than 4 percent age much faster than those with indexes above 8 percent. Therefore, your omega-3 index may also be an effective marker of your rate of aging.

Although this research is preliminary, I would suggest that optimizing your omega-3 levels above 8 percent would be a good strategy if you're interested in delaying aging. (Your doctor can order the omega-3 index test from a lab called Health Diagnostic Laboratory in Richmond, Virginia.)

5. Optimize Your Vitamin D Levels

In one study of more than 2,000 women, those with higher vitamin D levels were found to have fewer aging-related changes in their DNA, as well as lowered inflammatory responses.4 Additionally, people with low levels of vitamin D have been found to be more likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure, and diseased heart muscle -- and are three times more likely to die from any cause compared to those with normal levels.5

We have long known that it is best to get your vitamin D from sun exposure, and if at all possible, I strongly urge you to make sure you're getting out in the sun on a daily basis. If you can't get out in the sun, a safe tanning bed is the next best option. It is also important to make sure you get enough vitamin K2 to balance your vitamin D levels. The best way to get the vitamin K2 is from fermented vegetables that are created from special starter cultures that use bacteria that make vitamin K2.

6. Intermittent Fasting

There's a growing body of research showing that fasting has a beneficial impact on longevity in animals. There are a number of mechanisms contributing to this effect. Normalizing insulin sensitivity is a major one as insulin sensitivity is critical for the activation of the mTOR pathway, which plays an important part in repairing and regenerating your tissues including your muscles and thereby counteracting the aging process. The fact that it improves a number of potent disease markers indicates that fasting can have an overall beneficial effect on your general health. For example, modern science has confirmed fasting can help you:

Normalize your insulin sensitivity, which is key for optimal health as insulin resistance (which is what you get when your insulin sensitivity plummets) is a primary contributing factor to nearly all chronic disease, from diabetes to heart disease and even cancer
Normalize ghrelin levels, also known as "the hunger hormone"
Promote human growth hormone (HGH) production, which plays an important part in health, fitness and slowing the aging process
Lower triglyceride levels
Reduce inflammation and lessening free radical damage

On intermittent fasting, the longest time you'll ever abstain from food is 36 hours, although 14-18 hours is more common. You can also opt to simply delay eating, for example skipping breakfast, or stop eating earlier in the day. The issue of fasting is a major shift from my typical recommendations. I've not been a major advocate for it in the past, but as many of you who have been reading this site for years know, I am always learning.

To that end, I've now revised my personal eating schedule to eliminate breakfast and restrict the time I eat food to a period of about six to seven hours each day, which is typically from noon to 6 or 7 pm.

One caveat: the same genes that promote human longevity also appear to suppress female reproductive capacity. Hence fasting and intense exercise protocols, both known to promote longevity, also lower estrogen levels, thereby modulating body composition in women and suppressing female reproductive capacity. So this may not be an ideal strategy for women of reproductive age who wish to have children.

Healthy Aging is a "Package Deal"

There is no "quick fix" or magic bullet when it comes to aging well. Generally speaking, the better you treat your body throughout your life, the better your aging experience will be.

Most people do not revel in the thought of getting older because for many "aging" is synonymous with aches and pains, forgetfulness and loneliness. It certainly is inevitable that you're going to get older, but I can tell you from personal experience that this does not have to be a bad thing.

Now, in my late 50s, I am the fittest I have ever been in my life, and I also live out every day to its fullest potential. I may have been able to run faster when I was younger but I would never trade that for the muscle strength, flexibility and knowledge that I have today. You too can achieve wellness on both physical and mental fronts, and you can do so at any age. In fact, in many respects life only continues to get better as the years go by.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Today -- ZINC!

By Dr. Mercola

Now that daylight is waning, cold and flu bugs are ready to jump on any warm body not armed with a strong immune system. With so many novel herbs and supplements on the market, it's easy to lose sight of the basics for robust immune defenses.

One of those is the trace element zinc. Your body needs zinc every day in just the right amount, because too much can be as harmful as too little. Your body has no way to store zinc, so it depends on a daily supply through diet. Zinc is important for a number of life-sustaining functions, including:

Strong immunity
Important component of the enzymes involved in tissue remodeling and prevention of cancer
Maintenance of your mood, mental clarity and restorative sleep
Prostate and intestinal health
Senses of taste and smell

Zinc is a constituent of at least 3,000 different proteins in your body and a component of more than 200 different enzymes. In fact, zinc is involved in more enzymatic reactions in your body than any other mineral. Zinc increases your production of white blood cells and helps them fight infection more effectively. It also increases killer cells that combat cancer, helps your immune system release more antibodies, and supports wound healing.

Could You Be Deficient in Zinc?

Mild zinc deficiency is relatively common, especially in infants and children, pregnant or breast-feeding women, elderly, people with poor gastrointestinal absorption or bowel disease like Crohn's disease, and for those eating vegetarian or vegan diets. A number of factors contribute to the overall problem of zinc deficiency:

Years of commercial farming practices, such as monocropping (planting large expanses of land with the same crop year after year), have left our soils deficient in natural minerals, like zinc.
Certain drugs deplete your body of zinc, such as ACE inhibitors, thiazide diuretics, and acid-reducing drugs like Prliosec and Pepcid.
Certain diets, such as vegetarian/vegan diets and high-grain diets, are low in bioavailable zinc and high in phytic acids, which further impair zinc absorption.

Mild zinc deficiency can lead to frequent colds and flu, chronic fatigue, and poor general health. In your child, when growth and development are vitally dependent on good nutrition, inadequate zinc can result in mood disturbances, poor memory, impaired learning and poor school performance. Zinc deficiency can also contribute to acne and poor eyesight. Chronic zinc deficiency can affect eyesight, taste, smell, and memory. White spots on your fingernails can indicate you're not getting enough zinc.

Zinc is a Key Mineral for Your Immune Health

If your body has inadequate zinc stores, you will experience increased susceptibility to a variety of infectious agents. Your white blood cells simply can't function without zinc. Zinc affects multiple aspects of your immune system, including neutrophils, natural killer cells, phagocytosis, cytokine production, antibody production, and even gene regulation within your lymphocytes. Zinc is involved in many basic cellular functions including DNA replication, RNA transcription, cell division and activation, and stabilization of cell membranes.

The research on zinc's effect on pathogens is a bit inconsistent, but many studies show a strong protective effect. Some studies show that zinc may reduce the duration of your cold by 50 percent.

The Cochrane Review found that zinc reduced both the duration and severity of symptoms of the common cold. And using zinc preventatively helped prevent colds, leading to fewer school absences and less antibiotic use by children. Zinc is the hallmark molecule for thymic proteins, which are immune substances made by your thymus gland. Without zinc, you lack this immune defense. Zinc salts are deadly to many pathogens. Viral gastroenteritis is slowed down by the ingestion of zinc due to direct antimicrobial action of the zinc ions in your gastrointestinal tract.

If You're Pregnant, Zinc is Even MORE Important

There is rarely a more nutritionally demanding time during a woman's life than pregnancy (and later breastfeeding), when the intake of nutrients from foods and supplements are needed not only to keep her body running but also to nourish and support her rapidly growing baby. Because zinc is required for proper cell division, it is vitally important to get adequate zinc during this time. Low zinc levels have been associated with the following:

Premature birth
Low birth weight babies
Growth retardation
Preeclampsia

One study found that zinc supplementation in pregnancy resulted in babies with significantly larger head circumference and higher birth weight. Zinc has many other important functions in your body, summarized in the following table:

Zinc is required for your body to utilize vitamin B6 Proper Sleep: Zinc, vitamin B6, and tryptophan are all needed to produce melatonin; zinc deficiency leads to insomnia
Mood: As with sleep, B6 is needed to produce serotonin, which is crucial for your mood Senses of taste and smell: Zinc is required to produce an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase (CA) VI, critical to taste and smell; deficiency can lead to anorexia.
Apoptosis, or "programmed cell death": Excessive apoptosis can occur from too much or too little zinc (this is why many viruses die in a zinc-rich environment) Eye health: Helps prevent ARMD (macular degeneration), night blindness and cataracts
Helps diabetics regulate insulin levels Skin health: Helps prevent and treat psoriasis, eczema, and acne (with results similar to tetracycline)
Treatment of Alzheimer's disease: Vast improvements in memory, understanding, communication, and social contact Improved outcomes for patients with HIV
Male sexual function: Treatment of male infertility, BPH, and erectile dysfunction; zinc may govern testosterone metabolism Reducing diarrhea in children with zinc deficiency
Antioxidant: Zinc retards oxidative processes in your body, although exact mechanisms remain unknown Anti-inflammatory: Zinc may reduce chronic inflammation and risk of atherosclerosis
High Grain Diets Directly Linked to Zinc Deficiency

High grain diets can lead to a number of health problems, including severe zinc deficiency, which in turn can lead to rickets and dwarfism. According to nutrition expert Dr. Loren Cordain:

"It is thought that the high levels of phytate in unleavened whole grain breads cause a zinc deficiency, which in turn is responsible for hypogonadal dwarfism, along with other health problems associated with zinc deficiencies. In Europe, where immigrant Pakistanis consume high levels of unleavened whole grain breads, rickets among their children remains a problem."

Why is this? Grains are high in phytic acids (as are legumes, seeds, and soy) and phytic acids are known to impair your absorption of minerals such as calcium, iron, magnesium and zinc. People in Western populations most at risk are those with diets high in unrefined grains, legumes, soy protein, and calcium, and low in animal protein.

Protein assists with zinc absorption. Animal proteins increase zinc absorption in general. Vegetarian and vegan diets, often high in grains and legumes, contain more phytic acid and may increase your risk for zinc deficiency. This is just one of many reasons I don't recommend eating a lot of grains.

How to Optimize Your Zinc Levels

As always, it's best to optimize your nutrition by implementing a diet rich in whole foods to receive your zinc requirements. Animal products are by far the richest in dietary zinc, as you can see in the table below. Oysters tip the scales at up to 182mg per serving!

Food Serving Size Zinc (mg)
Oysters 100 grams 16-182
Veal liver 100 grams 12
Pumpkin seeds (roasted) 100 grams 10
Roast beef 100 grams 10
Tahini (ground sesame seeds) 100 grams 10
Unsweetened chocolate 100 grams 9.6
Alaska King Crab 100 grams 7.6
Lamb 3 ounces 7.4
Peanuts (oil roasted) 100 grams 6.6
Cashews (dry roasted) 100 grams 5.6
Pork Shoulder 100 grams 5.0
Almonds 100 grams 3.5
Cheddar Cheese 100 grams 3.1
Chicken Leg 100 grams 2.9
Chicken Breast 100 grams 1.0



If, for whatever reason, you are not getting enough zinc, or are a vegetarian or have one of the conditions listed in the table above, you may want to add a zinc supplement. But what kind of supplement should you take?

Chelated Forms of Zinc are Better Absorbed

There are a number of forms of zinc available on the market, some better than others. Your body does not easily absorb zinc, unless the zinc is first attached to another substance. Chelation is a process sometimes used to attach zinc to other substances to make it more absorbable and bioavailable. In chelation, the organic molecules have been electrically charged, which allows them to attract the zinc. One advantage of chelated forms is you won't get antagonism with calcium, which can be an issue for zinc salts, such as zinc sulfate.

Zinc sulfate is one of the inorganic forms of zinc, or zinc salts. These are not as biologically effective as chelated forms. Zinc sulfate can cause stomach irritation. Another inorganic variety is zinc oxide, which is the form of zinc used in many sunscreens.

Other good forms of zinc include zinc gluconate, which is made essentially by fermenting glucose; zinc acetate, made by combining the zinc with acetic acid; and zinc citrate, made by combining the zinc with citric acid. It's advantageous to take a supplement with a variety of forms, if possible. The current RDAs for zinc are listed in the following table:

Age Male Female Pregnancy Lactation
0-6 months 2 mg 2 mg
7 months to 3 years 3 mg 3 mg
4-8 years 5 mg 5 mg
9-13 years 8 mg 8 mg
14-18 years 11 mg 9 mg 12 mg 13 mg
19 + years 11 mg 8 mg 11 mg 12 mg



These recommended doses are for ELEMENTAL zinc, and each form of zinc (zinc sulfate, zinc citrate, zinc gluconate, etc.) contains a different amount of elemental zinc. The amount of elemental zinc a supplement contains will be listed in the Supplemental Facts panel on the supplement container.

For example, approximately 23 percent of zinc sulfate consists of elemental zinc. Therefore, 220 mg of zinc sulfate would give you about 50 mg of elemental zinc. You must take this into consideration if you're going to use a supplement, as well as the fact that the average person gets about 10 to 15 mg of zinc per day from the foods you consume. You will have to use your best judgment in determining if you are at the upper or lower end of that range, based on your dietary habits, and supplement accordingly.

Too Much of a Good Thing…

Foods and medications can interfere with absorption, so the timing of your supplement is important. For example, caffeine can interfere with zinc absorption of zinc by as much as 50 percent—so you will want to avoid chasing down your supplement with a cup of coffee. By contrast, the amino acids cysteine and methionine improve zinc absorption, which means taking your zinc supplement with a high-quality whey protein would be a dynamite immune-boosting duo.

Although it is important to get adequate zinc, balance is key. Taking TOO MUCH can also cause problems, although it generally takes fairly high doses over time to reach toxic levels. Chronically excessive zinc intake can suppress copper and iron absorption leading to deficiencies in those minerals.

In conclusion, zinc is an often forgotten nutritional staple to add to your flu-busting arsenal. It's inexpensive insurance that can stop those viruses dead in their tracks. In addition to making sure you're getting enough zinc, don't forget how important your vitamin D levels are for keeping you healthy this winter.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Ah-hah -- an important link between Vitamin D3, calcium usage in the body and VITAMIN K2 - read on.
By Dr. Mercola

Vitamin K is a fat-soluble vitamin most well known for the important role it plays in blood clotting. However, many do not realize that there are different kinds of vitamin K, and they are completely different.

The health benefits of vitamin K2 go far beyond blood clotting, which is done by vitamin K1, and vitamin K2 also works synergistically with a number of other nutrients, including calcium and vitamin D.

Dr. Kate Rheaume-Bleue, a naturopathic physician with a keen interest in nutrition, has authored what I believe is one of the most comprehensive books on this important topic, titled: Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox: How a Little Known Vitamin Could Save Your Life

"I tuned in to the emerging research about K2 early in 2007," she says. "Not long before, I had read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price. When I learned about vitamin K2, I thought:

"Hey, you know what? I'm sure Price talked all about this in his book." I went to the book, looked through it, and didn't find any reference to vitamin K2. I was really stumped.

A little bit later in 2007, I read a brilliant article by Chris Masterjohn that links vitamin K2 to Prices' work on Activator X.

Once I realized that link, the light bulb went on about how important this nutrient is, and how overlooked it's been for so long. It really provides the missing piece to the puzzle of so many health conditions, and yet it was being completely overlooked, despite the overwhelming amounts of modern-day research."

What's So Special About Vitamin K2?

Vitamin K is actually a group of fat-soluble vitamins. Of the two main ones, K1 and K2, the one receiving the most attention is K1, which is found in green leafy vegetables and is very easy to get through your diet. This lack of distinction has created a lot of confusion, and it's one of the reasons why vitamin K2 has been overlooked for so long.

The three types of vitamin K are:

Vitamin K1, or phylloquinone, is found naturally in plants, especially green vegetables; K1 goes directly to your liver and helps you maintain healthy blood clotting
Vitamin K2, also called menaquinone, is made by the bacteria that line your gastrointestinal tract; K2 goes straight to your blood vessel walls, bones, and tissues other than your liver
Vitamin K3, or menadione, is a synthetic form I do not recommend; it's important to note that toxicity has occurred in infants injected with this synthetic vitamin K3

Vitamin K1 exclusively participates in blood clotting — that's sole purpose. K2 on the other hand comes from a whole different set of food sources, and its biological role is to help move calcium into the proper areas in your body, such as your bones and teeth. It also plays a role in removing calcium from areas where it shouldn't be, such as in your arteries and soft tissues.

"K2 is really critical for keeping your bones strong and your arteries clear," Rheaume-Bleue says.

Now, vitamin K2 can be broken into two additional categories, called:

MK-4 (menaquinone-4), a short-chain form of vitamin K2 found in butter, egg yolks, and animal-based foods
MK-7 (menaquinone-7), longer-chain forms found in fermented foods. There's a variety of these long-chain forms but the most common one is MK-7. This is the one you'll want to look for in supplements, because in a supplement form, the MK-4 products are actually synthetic. They are not derived from natural food products containing MK-4.

The MK-7 – these long-chain, natural bacterial-derived vitamin K2 – is from a fermentation process, which offers a number of health advantages:
It stays in your body longer, and
It has a longer half-life, which means you can just take it once a day in very convenient dosing

How Much Vitamin K2 Do You Need?

The optimal amounts of vitamin K2 are still under investigation, but it seems likely that 180 to 200 micrograms of vitamin K2 should be enough to activate your body's K2-dependent proteins to shuttle the calcium where it needs to be, and remove it from the places where it shouldn't.

"The most recent clinical trials used around those amounts of K2," Rheaume-Bleue says. "The average person is getting a lot less than that. That's for sure. In the North American diet, you can see as little as maybe 10 percent of that or less. Certainly, not near enough to be able to optimize bone density and improve heart health."

She estimates that about 80 percent of Americans do not get enough vitamin K2 in their diet to activate their K2 proteins, which is similar to the deficiency rate of vitamin D. Vitamin K2 deficiency leaves you vulnerable for a number of chronic diseases, including:
Osteoporosis Heart disease Heart attack and stroke
Inappropriate calcification, from heel spurs to kidney stones Brain disease Cancer

"I talked about vitamin K2 moving calcium around the body. Its other main role is to activate proteins that control cell growth. That means K2 has a very important role to play in cancer protection," Rheaume-Bleue says.

"When we're lacking K2, we're at much greater risk for osteoporosis, heart disease, and cancer. And these are three concerns that used to be relatively rare. Over the last 100 years, as we've changed the way we produced our food and the way we eat, they have become very common."

Researchers are also looking into other health benefits. For example, one recent study published in the journal Modern Rheumatology1 found that vitamin K2 has the potential to improve disease activity besides osteoporosis in those with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Another, published in the journal Science2, found that vitamin K2 serves as a mitochondrial electron carrier, thereby helping maintain normal ATP production in mitochondrial dysfunction, such as that found in Parkinson's Disease.

According to the authors:

"We identified Drosophila UBIAD1/Heix as a modifier of pink1, a gene mutated in Parkinson's disease that affects mitochondrial function. We found that vitamin K(2) was necessary and sufficient to transfer electrons in Drosophila mitochondria. Heix mutants showed severe mitochondrial defects that were rescued by vitamin K(2), and, similar to ubiquinone, vitamin K(2) transferred electrons in Drosophila mitochondria, resulting in more efficient adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production. Thus, mitochondrial dysfunction was rescued by vitamin K(2) that serves as a mitochondrial electron carrier, helping to maintain normal ATP production."

The Interplay Between Vitamin K2, Vitamin D, and Calcium

As I've discussed on numerous occasions, vitamin D is a critical nutrient for optimal health and is best obtained from sun exposure or a safe tanning bed. However, many are taking oral vitamin D, which may become problematic unless you're also getting sufficient amounts of vitamin K2. Dr. Rheaume-Bleue explains:

"When you take vitamin D, your body creates more of these vitamin K2-dependent proteins, the proteins that will move the calcium around. They have a lot of potential health benefits. But until the K2 comes in to activate those proteins, those benefits aren't realized. So, really, if you're taking vitamin D, you're creating an increased demand for K2. And vitamin D and K2 work together to strengthen your bones and improve your heart health.

... For so long, we've been told to take calcium for osteoporosis... and vitamin D, which we know is helpful. But then, more studies are coming out showing that increased calcium intake is causing more heart attacks and strokes. That created a lot of confusion around whether calcium is safe or not. But that's the wrong question to be asking, because we'll never properly understand the health benefits of calcium or vitamin D, unless we take into consideration K2. That's what keeps the calcium in its right place."

IMPORTANT: If You Take Vitamin D, You Need K2

This is a really crucial point: If you opt for oral vitamin D, you need to also consume in your food or take supplemental vitamin K2.

"There are so many people on the vitamin-D-mega-dose bandwagon, taking more and more of vitamin D. And it could absolutely be causing harm if you are lacking the K2 to complete the job to get the calcium where it's supposed to be," Rheaume-Bleue warns.

"We don't see symptoms of vitamin D toxicity very often. But when we do, those symptoms are inappropriate calcification. That's the symptom of vitamin D toxicity. And it is actually a lack of vitamin K2 that can cause that..."

While the ideal or optimal ratios between vitamin D and vitamin K2 have yet to be elucidated, Rheume-Bleue suggests that for every 1,000 IU's of vitamin D you take, you may benefit from about 100 micrograms of K2, and perhaps as much as 150-200 micrograms (mcg).

The latest vitamin D dosing recommendations, which call for about 8,000 IU's of vitamin D3 per day if you're an adult, means you'd need in the neighborhood of 800 to 1,000 micrograms (0.8 to 1 milligram/mg) of vitamin K2.

"My earlier recommendation was not taking into account people who were doing high dose of vitamin D supplementation," Rheaume-Bleue says. "That's where it gets a little bit more technical. It seems that for the average person, around 200 to 280 micrograms will activate your K2 proteins and do a lot of good for your bones and your heart. If you're taking high levels of vitamin D... then I would recommend taking more K2."

The good news is that vitamin K2 has no toxicity. No toxic effects have ever been demonstrated in the medical literature.

"The reason why K2 doesn't have potential toxic effect is that all vitamin K2 does is activate K2 proteins. It will activate all the K2 proteins it finds. And if they're all activated and you take extra K2, it simply won't do that. That's why we don't see a potential for toxicity the way we do with vitamin A or D," she says.

If You Need Calcium, Aim for Calcium-Rich Foods First

For those who are calcium deficient, Rheaume-Bleue recommends looking to food sources high in calcium, before opting for a supplement. This is because many high calcium foods also contain naturally high amounts of, you guessed it, vitamin K2! Nature cleverly gives us these two nutrients in combination, so they work optimally. Good sources of calcium include dairy, especially cheeses, and vegetables, although veggies aren't high in K2.

Additionally, magnesium is far more important than calcium if you are going to consider supplementing. Magnesium will also help keep magnesium in the cell to do its job far better. In many ways it serves as nutritional version of the highly effective class of drugs called calcium channel blockers. If you do chose to supplement with calcium, for whatever reason, it's important to maintain the proper balance between your intake of calcium and other nutrients such as:

Vitamin K2
Vitamin D
Magnesium

The Importance of Magnesium

As mentioned previously, magnesium is another important player to allow for proper function of calcium. As with vitamin D and K2, magnesium deficiency is also common, and when you are lacking in magnesium and take calcium, you may exacerbate the situation. Vitamin K2 and magnesium complement each other, as magnesium helps lower blood pressure, which is an important component of heart disease.

Dietary sources of magnesium include sea vegetables, such as kelp, dulse, and nori. Few people eat these on a regular basis however, if at all. Vegetables can also be a good source, along with whole grains. However, grains MUST be prepared properly to remove phytates and anti-nutrients that can otherwise block your absorption of magnesium. As for supplements, Rheaume-Bleue recommends using magnesium citrate. Another emerging one is magnesium threonate, which appears promising primarily due to its superior ability to penetrate the mitochondrial membrane.

How Can You Tell if You're Lacking in Vitamin K2?

There's no way to test for vitamin K2 deficiency. But by assessing your diet and lifestyle, you can get an idea of whether or not you may be lacking in this critical nutrient. If you have any of the following health conditions, you're likely deficient in vitamin K2 as they are all connected to K2:

Do you have osteoporosis?
Do you have heart disease?
Do you have diabetes?

If you do not have any of those health conditions, but do NOT regularly eat high amounts of the following foods, then your likelihood of being vitamin K2 deficient is still very high:

Grass-fed organic animal products (i.e. eggs, butter, dairy)
Certain fermented foods such as natto, or vegetables fermented using a starter culture of vitamin K2-producing bacteria. Please note that most fermented vegetables are not really high in vitamin K2 and come in at about 50 mcg per serving. However, if specific starter cultures are used they can have ten times as much, or 500 mcg per serving.
Goose liver pâté
Certain cheeses such as Brie and Gouda (these two are particularly high in K2, containing about 75 mcg per ounce)

"An important thing to mention when it comes to cheese (because this becomes an area of confusion), [is that] because cheese is a bacterial derived form of vitamin K2, it actually doesn't matter if the cheese came from grass-fed milk. That would be nice, but it's not the milk that went into the cheese that makes the K2. It's the bacteria making the cheese, which means it doesn't matter if you're importing your brie from France or getting it domestically. Brie cheese, the bacteria that makes brie cheese, will make vitamin K2," she says.

Fermented vegetables, which are one of my new passions, primarily for supplying beneficial bacteria back into our gut, can be a great source of vitamin K if you ferment your own using the proper starter culture. We recently had samples of high-quality fermented organic vegetables made with our specific starter culture tested, and were shocked to discover that not only does a typical serving of about two to three ounces contain about 10 trillion beneficial bacteria, but it also contained 500 mcg of vitamin K2.

Note that not every strain of bacteria makes K2. For example, most yoghurts have almost no vitamin K2. Certain types of cheeses are very high in K2, and others are not. It really depends on the specific bacteria. You can't assume that any fermented food will be high in K2, but some fermented foods are very high in K2, such as natto. Others, such as miso and tempeh, are not high n K2.

Pregnant? Make Sure You're Getting Enough Vitamin K2

Last but not least, while vitamin K2 is critical for the prevention of a number of chronic diseases listed above, it's also vital for women who are trying to conceive, who are pregnant, and for growing healthy children. "K2 plays a very important role throughout pregnancy (for the development of teeth for both primary and adult teeth, the development of proper facial form, healthy facial form, as well as strong bones), then again throughout childhood to prevent cavities, and through adolescence as the skeleton is growing," Rheaume-Bleue says.

Vitamin K2 is needed throughout pregnancy, and later while breastfeeding. It may be particularly important during the third trimester, as most women's levels tend to drop at that time, indicating there's an additional drain on the system toward the end of the pregnancy. Since vitamin K2 has no toxicity issues, it may be prudent to double or even triple — which is what Rheaume-Bleue did during her own recent pregnancy — your intake while pregnant.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Dr Mercola warns about certain drugs' side-effects, and makes his recommendations.

By Dr. Mercola

Diabetes has increased more than 700 percent in the last 50 years. Today, more than one in four Americans are either pre-diabetic or have full-blown diabetes.

The conventional treatment route includes a variety of diabetes drugs, some of which have been found to do far more harm than good. Rosiglitazone, sold under the names of Avandia, Avandamet and Avaglim, is perhaps the most well-known in this category of unmitigated disasters.

Avandia Part of Worst Drug Fraud in History

This past summer, drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline agreed to a record-breaking $3 billion settlement over the sales and marketing practices of several of its drugs, including the dangerous diabetes drug Avandia. The payment is the largest fraud settlement in U.S. history, and the largest fine ever paid by a drug company.

Avandia was found to be profoundly dangerous — a fact hidden by GSK for over 10 years, as they knew it would adversely affect sales
1.

This was revealed in a Senate Finance Committee report, released by Max Baucus and Charles E. Grassley in February 2010. The report also asked why the FDA allowed a clinical trial of Avandia to continue even after the agency estimated the drug had caused an estimated 83,000 heart attacks between 1999 and 20072.

Avandia hit the market in 1999 and quickly became a blockbuster drug. By 2006 its annual revenue was $3.2 billion. A year later, a damning study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) linked it to a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack and a 64 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death than patients treated with other methods3.

This is a steep price, to say the least, for a disease that does not require drugs to begin with.

There were many articles and reviews published about Avandia following the New England Journal of Medicine study, but research from the Mayo Clinic revealed that 90 percent of scientists who wrote favorable articles about the drug had financial ties to GlaxoSmithKline4. Unfortunately, a committee of independent experts still recommended that Avandia remain on the market, despite its many risks, and a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight board voted 8 to 7 to accept the advice.

On September 23, 2010, the FDA restricted access to Avandia5, but it didn't take it off the market. Under the ruling, the drug is still available to patients not already taking it, but only if they are unable to achieve glycemic control using other medications and, in consultation with their health care professional, decide not to take a different drug for medical reasons.

Shockingly, current users of Avandia were told to continue using the medication if they appeared to be benefiting from it and they acknowledged that they understood the risks. Doctors had to attest to and document their patients' eligibility and patients had to review statements describing the cardiovascular safety concerns.

Unlike the US FDA, British regulators ruled that the benefits of Avandia no longer outweighed the risks, and so, in late September 2010, they told 90,000 British diabetes patients to stop taking it.

DPP-4 Inhibitors — Another Disastrous Diabetes Drug

Dr. Ron Rosedale, one of my mentors on the importance of insulin first alerted me to this issue in our recent interviews we had but are not yet published. This is another potential disaster-in-the-making, namely that of Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors6 (DPP-4 inhibitors), also known as gliptins (specifically, gliptins decrease the breakdown of glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1). These belong to a class of hypoglycemic drugs used to treat type 2 diabetes. DPP-4 inhibitors work by reducing glucagon and blood glucose levels7 (inhibiting glucagon release results in increased insulin secretion and decreased blood glucose).

The first drug in this class — Sitagliptin, manufactured by Merck and sold under the name Januvia8,9 — received FDA approval in 200610. Saxagliptin (Onglyza), another DPP-4 inhibitor, was approved in July 2009, followed by Linagliptin (Trajenta) in 2011. A number of additional DPP-4 inhibitors are currently under development.

I was among the first to publicly warn that another of Merck's drugs, Vioxx, would kill thousands from heart disease. The drug indeed wound up killing over 60,000 people before Merck removed it from the market in 2004.

To compound this problem even further, Merck has announced that it has successfully completed a Phase II trial of a once-a-week version of a DPP-4 inhibitor. In pharma announcements and in its own company literature, Merck indicates that the once-a-week version is also being tested in combination with certain statin drugs, such as Lipitor and Simvastatin. The reasoning for these drug combinations is that diabetics fall under the guidelines of being statin candidates because they have a higher cardiovascular risk, but 40 percent of diabetics don't take them.

The idea is to create a combination drug containing both a DPP-4 inhibitor and a statin. So one drug will radically increase your risk of cancer, and the other increase your risk of heart failure. These are virtually guaranteed side effects from these drugs when taken individually, but what has not even been studied is the synergistic toxicity of taking these dangerous drugs together.

So far, Merck has discussed the alleged efficacy of their once-a-week DPP-4 inhibitor. However, clinicaltrials.gov indicates that the SAFETY trial isn't until Phase III, which is just now beginning. Still, with or without company-performed (read biased) safety trials, there's plenty of reason to suspect these drugs can, and probably will, spell severe trouble for diabetics who take them. For example, Sitagliptin, sold under the names Januvia11 and Janumet, has a number of admitted side effects, including:

Low blood sugar
Allergic reactions and anaphylaxis (rash, hives, swelling of face, lips, tongue and/or throat)
Acute pancreatitis
Death

Anaphylaxis is in fact such a grave hazard with this drug that it actually carries a black box warning for lactic acidosis: "If acidosis is suspected, discontinue Janumet and hospitalize the patient immediately" According to diatetesselfmanagement.com12:

"... DPP-4 was discovered through its association with the immune system, and some researchers thought that inhibiting it might impair the immune system. So far, data from clinical studies have not demonstrated a serious immunosuppresive effect. They do indicate, though, that sitagliptin increases the risk of upper respiratory infections and nasopharyngitis (inflammation of the nose and pharynx), found in 6.3% and 5.2% of study subjects, respectively, who took sitagliptin versus 3.3% and 3.4% for placebo.

The most worrying side effects are those reported since the drug came onto the market.

These reactions seem to be allergic in nature and include anaphylaxis, a bodywide reaction that results in low blood pressure, and angioedema, a swelling of the tongue, face, and throat. Both of these may be life-threatening. The reactions have occurred anytime from immediately after taking the first dose until three months after starting the drug. There have also been reports of skin reactions, including a very severe type of drug reaction called Stevens–Johnson syndrome. Other diabetes drugs are not typically associated with Stevens–Johnson syndrome."

The Science You Don't Hear About — DPP-4 Inhibitors Repeatedly Linked to Cancer...

Another potential side effect of this class of drugs that you won't see in any drug advert or hear from your doctor is its potential link to cancer... Upon review of the medical literature, a number of studies have already indicated a connection of pancreatic, thyroid, colon, melanoma, and prostate cancer with DPP-4 inhibitors. Such studies include:

A 2006 study13 found that "the use of DPPIV inhibitors together with GLP-2 led to increased proliferation as well as elevated migratory activity. Therefore, the use of DPPIV inhibitors could increase the risk of promoting an already existing intestinal tumor and may support the potential of colon cancer cells to metastasize"
One 2008 study14 found that DPP-4 inhibitors may proteolytically inactivate local mediators involved in gliomagenesis (the formation and development of brain tumors). Another study published that same year15 linked the drug to prostate cancer
In 201016, researchers concluded that "although the data on the effects of DPP-IV inhibitors in humans are scarce, the increased risk of infections and the tendency towards a higher incidence of some tumors fall in line with experimental evidence suggesting the possibility of their adverse immunological and oncological effects"
According to a 2011 study in the journal Gastroentorology17,18: "data are consistent with case reports and animal studies indicating an increased risk for pancreatitis with glucagon-like peptide-1 based therapy. The findings also raise caution about the potential long-term actions of these drugs to promote pancreatic cancer, and DPP-4 inhibition to increase risk for all cancers"
Earlier this year, researchers warned19 DPP-4 "is implicated in regulation of malignant transformation, promotion and further progression of cancer, exerting tumor-suppressing or even completely opposite - tumor-promoting activities.

This study indicates the need for exploring the cause and the importance of the disturbances in the serum DPP-4 activity and in the CD26 expression on immunocompetent cells in complex molecular mechanisms underlying the development and progression of melanoma. Significant decline in serum DPP-4 activity found in melanoma patients compared to healthy controls might indicate its possible role in development and progression of melanoma, but further research needs to be done in order to fully elucidate the cause and the importance of observed changes in DPP-4 activity"

Logic Quiz: DPP-4 is a Tumor Suppressor, So What Happens When You Continuously Inhibit DPP-4?

A 2008 blog post on DiabetesUpdate20 spells out the concerns I have about this class of diabetes drugs:

"Two new studies grabbed my attention and should be of great interest to anyone taking Januvia. These studies looked at the impact of inhibiting DPP-4 on the growth of two different kinds of cancers. This is important because the way Januvia lowers blood sugar is by inhibiting DPP-4. It does this because DPP-4 is a protease (an enzyme that chops up protein chains) that, among other things, destroys a hormone, GLP-1, that helps control blood sugar levels. When you inhibit DPP-4, GLP-1 levels to rise and blood sugars drop.

But none of the drug industry-sponsored testing for the safety of Januvia looked at the other things that DPP-4 does. Fortunately, some academic researchers not-funded by drug makers are doing this and what they are finding should make any sane person stop taking Januvia. Because it turns out that DPP-4 is also a tumor suppressor. And when you inhibit it, cells that have become cancerous get a 'get out of jail free' card."

Just think about the logic (or rather, the lack thereof) of taking a drug that continuously inhibits one of your body's natural cancer suppressing mechanisms! According to Januvia's drug information, the drug inhibits the DPP-4 enzyme for 24 hours, and you take it daily, effectively permanently blocking the activity of a tumor suppressor gene. Yet none of the safety studies on Januvia addressed its impact on tumor growth!

Is this wise? I don't see how it can be — especially for a disease that doesn't require drug treatment to be resolved. The blogger received the following emailed note21 from a researcher who worked on one of the studies listed above (the author and study in question was not identified, and probably for good reason):

"... Inhibiting DPPIV function in general (according to ours and others research) may not be a great idea. I believe that decrease or loss of DPPIV may be associated with cancer initiation or progression. We have shown that loss of DPPIV is indeed associated with melanoma, prostate and lung cancers. Importantly our work has shown that restoring DPPIV can suppress the tumor growth..."

In a 2010 article in the journal Diabetes Care22 entitled "GLP-1–Based Therapy for Diabetes: What You Do Not Know Can Hurt You," the authors state:

"In conclusion, we believe it is premature to conclude that the GLP-1 class of drugs has been established as having a good safety profile and is appropriate for a relatively early choice of therapy for type 2 diabetes.

There are grounds for concern that the GLP-1 class of drugs [which includes DPP-4 inhibitors] may induce asymptomatic pancreatitis and, over time in some individuals, induce pancreatic cancer... [T]he implications of the data are sufficiently serious that continuing to promote this class of drugs without establishing clear experimental evidence to permit the concern to be rejected is irresponsible. Moreover, arguably patients prescribed these drugs should be made aware of the potential risks of pancreatic cancer."

"Researchers" Who Debunk Cancer Link are Paid Spokespersons for Big Pharma

Not surprisingly, some researchers have spoken out against studies linking DPP-4 inhibitors and GLP-1 agonists (such as Byetta, which was approved in 2009) with various cancers, calling such findings "flawed." Alas, it may be wise to look at who these people are, and who pays them. In an IBJ.com article published last year23, Dr. Michael Nauck, head of the Diabeteszentrum Bad Lauterberg in Harz, Germany said, with regards to studies linking GLP-1 agonist drugs Byetta and Victoza with increased risk of cancer:

"The bulk of findings tends to speak against such an association... There is no general agreement."

According to the article:

"Nauck debated Peter Butler of the University of California at Los Angeles at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes meeting Friday on whether so-called GLP-1 therapies increase cancer risk. Sales of the drugs may be hurt should Butler's view prevail that there are signs of increased cancer from the drugs. He and other UCLA researchers said in a study this year that a review of a database of side effects showed patients taking Byetta and a Merck & Co. drug [Januvia] had a higher chance of developing pancreatic or thyroid tumors. The treatments are safe and there's no evidence of a higher cancer risk, according to the manufacturers of the drugs."

Who is Michael Nauck 24? While his biography may not spell it out, Professor Nauck has been a speaker and consultant25 for a long list of pharmaceutical companies, including Amylin Pharmaceuticals (the maker of Byetta), Novo Nordisk (maker of Victoza), Merck, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly & Co, and GlaxoSmithKline, just to rattle off a few. Note the first two I listed are the very makers of the very drugs he's arguing the safety of. So much for an independent opinion. He's also received grants and financial research support from a number of drug companies.

According to Peter Butler26, co-author of the Gastroenterology study listed earlier, the GLP-1 drug class "could have serious unintended and unpredicted side effects." His research discovered that patients taking Byetta and Januvia had a:

Six-fold increased chance of pancreatitis, and
Nearly three times greater rate of pancreatic cancer

In a September 2011 article in Bloomberg27, Matteo Monami, a physician at the University of Florence and Carreggi Teaching Hospital in Italy called Butler's study "an erroneous analysis," stating that its results "are really not reliable at all." Monami countered Butler's findings with a meta-analysis28 of his own, which not only found no increase in cancer or pancreatitis for DPP-4 inhibitors like Januvia, but also "possible protection from cardiovascular events."

What the media failed to report was that Monami is a paid spokesperson for Merck (the maker of Januvia — the drug at the center of the controversy), Astra Zeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli. Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Takeda. Knowing he's a paid Big Pharma spokesperson, surely no one can be surprised that Monami's analysis and "professional opinion" clears his employers' drugs of any potential cancer links...

Billions of Dollars at Stake...

When Merck and the FDA finally agree that DPP-4 inhibitors are linked to cancer, it will kill several of the most recent drug developments for diabetes. Untold hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars have already been invested in getting these new drugs to market. And the profits from these drugs are expected to be in the tens of billions at minimum..

According to Merck, Januvia is now the number one best-selling drug in the oral diabetes market. Should such a blockbuster drug be proven to be connected to cancer, it would be a HUGE loss not only to Merck, but several other major pharmaceutical companies that have developed similar drugs.

One of the most horrific parts of this is the fact that cancer can take decades to form — unless the drug dramatically speeds up the process by inhibiting your body's ability to suppress tumor growth. Merck's lethal drug Vioxx was only withdrawn from the market after its lethality became too obvious to ignore. Ditto for the dangerous diabetes drug Avandia. Those drugs caused heart attacks and stroke. Cancer, on the other hand is not something that will tend to make people keel over after a relatively short period of time.

They could make MASSIVE amounts of money from these clearly dangerous drugs while cancer slowly and quietly grows in patients taking them, while biased shills maintain that the science is still "unclear." I for one would urge you to reconsider taking any kind of DPP-4 inhibitor. Why risk cancer for an ailment you can effectively address without ANY drug at all?

Type 2 Diabetes is Nearly 100 Percent Preventable... and Reversible Without Drugs

There is simply no doubt in my mind that these drugs will be removed from the market, but not after many years, potentially decades, and likely after they have killed tens of thousands of people. But you don't have to needlessly suffer and wait till they are formally removed. You can stop taking them now. Reversing type 2 diabetes is one of the simplest and most straight-forward treatments in all of medicine.

It's important to understand that many of the conventional recommendations for treating diabetes are not only flawed but dead wrong, and I discussed the reasons why in this previous article. To reverse the disease, you need to recover your body's insulin and leptin sensitivities – the ones that are so badly upset by eating a poor diet. The ONLY way to accomplish this is through proper diet and exercise. There is NO drug that can correct leptin signaling and insulin resistance.

It will be absolutely crucial to eliminate ALL sugars and virtually all grains from your diet. You want to strive for an ultra-low carbohydrate diet seeking to restrict your carbs to high fiber vegetables only. You can replace the missing carbs with high quality fats like coconut oil, which are rapidly broken down and consumed as fuel so you won't feel as tired or fatigued when you make the transition to fat burning mode. Using intermittent fasting and restricting all your calories to a 6-8-hour window will also radically help your ability to transition to fat burning mode and improve your insulin and leptin signaling.

Adhering to the following guidelines can help you do at least three things that are essential for successfully treating, and reversing, diabetes: recover your insulin/leptin sensitivity, help normalize your weight, and normalize your blood pressure:

Severely limit or eliminate sugar and grains in your diet, especially fructose, which is far more detrimental than any other type of sugar. Following my Nutrition Plan will help you do this without too much fuss. Likely long before you work your way up to the Advanced Section, your type 2 diabetes will be under control without any drugs.
Exercise regularly. Exercise is an absolutely essential factor, and without it, you're unlikely to get this devastating disease under control. It is one of the fastest and most powerful ways to lower your insulin and leptin resistance. I recommend reviewing my exercise program for tips and guidelines. It is also critical to work your way up to include some Peak Fitness exercises.
Avoid trans fats.
Get plenty of omega-3 fats from a high quality, animal-based source, such as krill oil.
Optimize your vitamin D levels. Recent studies have revealed that getting enough vitamin D can have a powerful effect on normalizing your blood pressure.
Optimize your gut flora. Your gut is a living ecosystem, full of both good bacteria and bad. Multiple studies have shown that obese people have different intestinal bacteria than lean people. The more good bacteria you have, the stronger your immune system will be and the better your body will function overall.

Fortunately, optimizing your gut flora is relatively easy. You can reseed your body with good bacteria by eating fermented foods (like natto, kefir, raw organic cheese, miso, and fermented vegetables) or by taking a high-quality probiotic supplement.
Address any underlying emotional issues and/or stress. Non-invasive tools like the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) can be extremely helpful and effective.
Get enough high-quality sleep every night.
Monitor your fasting insulin level. This is every bit as important as your fasting blood sugar. You'll want your fasting insulin level to be between 2 and 4. The higher your level, the worse your insulin sensitivity is.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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On how to exercise, and how NOT to exercise. Pls note this especially:
Equally remarkable were the results of yet another study, in which unfit but otherwise healthy middle-aged adults were able to improve their insulin sensitivity and blood sugar regulation after just two weeks of interval training (three sessions per week)4. A follow-up study5 also found that interval training positively impacted insulin sensitivity. In fact, the study involved people with full-blown type 2 diabetes, and just ONE interval training session was able to improve blood sugar regulation for the next 24 hours! This truly is amazing, and while aerobic fitness is indeed important, improving and maintaining good insulin sensitivity is perhaps one of the most important aspects of optimal health.
By Dr. Mercola

In the TED talk above, Dr. James O'Keefe, a research cardiologist and a former elite athlete, discusses an important point that can be difficult for some to accept, namely the fact that extreme cardio can actually do more harm than good...

I am about two years older than Dr. O'Keefe and had a similar running history. Dr. O'Keefe actually won the largest sprint distance triathlon in Kansas City five years in a row, from 1999 to 20041 . Although I was never an elite athlete like Dr. O'Keefe, I had run a 2:50 marathon previously. It is satisfying to hear Dr. O'Keefe validate what I have been writing about for years now. I suspect we both wised up and stopped running at about the same age, after many decades of intense endurance training.

The myth that extreme endurance cardio is good for your heart took off at full speed when, in 1977, Dr. Thomas Bassler boldly proclaimed that "completing a marathon confers immunity against heart attack." Many die-hard runners still believe this to be true.

However, in the years since, research has shown that the complete opposite may be true2. According to one study, presented in the video above, once you reach 40-50 minutes of vigorous exercise per day, the benefits from your efforts plateau, and further efforts do not convey further improvements in life expectancy.

When it comes to light to moderate exercise, on the other hand — such as walking, housework, and similar less strenuous day-to-day activities — more is better. It's not as effective as vigorous exercise (performed less than about 40 minutes a day), but the more active you are throughout the day, the better your life expectancy.

Survival of the Moderately Fit

As Dr. O'Keefe says, "Darwin was wrong about one thing. It's not survival of the fittest, but survival of the moderately fit." If you can dance, or lightly swim, or jog at six miles an hour, your mortality rate plummets compared to someone who can barely walk a flight of stairs.
However:

"Further attainments of peak fitness do not translate into further increases in life expectancy. It plateaus out," Dr. O'Keefe says. "We weren't born to run. We were born to walk, and we need to be walking more... you need to be moving your body more than sitting — every chance you get, move! "

I've often described exercise as a drug that needs to be taken in the ideal dosage to impart the optimal benefit. Too little, and you won't get any benefit. Too much, and you could do harm.

As Dr. O'Keefe describes, extended extreme cardio actually sets in motion inflammatory mechanisms that damage your heart. So while your heart is indeed designed to work very hard, and will be strengthened from doing so, it's only designed to do so intermittently, and for short periods — not for an hour or more at a time. Repeatedly and consistently overwhelming the heart by long distance marathon running, for example, actually prematurely ages your heart.

Veteran endurance athletes have a five-fold increased risk of atrial fibrillation, a dangerous irregular heart rhythm. Worse yet, some endurance athletes also present ventricular tachycardia (a heart rhythm faster than 100-120 beats per minute), which can lead to ventricular fibrillation — a leading cause of sudden cardiac death.

Runners Live Longer — But Only Those Who Run Within the Goldilocks Zone...

Dr. O'Keefe also summarizes new research about to be published, showing that, yes, runners do live longer — in general, nearly 20 percent longer than non-runners. The study in question followed 14,000 runners and 38,000 non-runners for up to three decades. And they found that, to optimize the health benefits from running, you'll want to run 5-20 miles per week — the ideal amount being 10-15 miles per week. Once you reach 25 miles or more per week, the benefits actually disappear!

Also, if you run too fast — over eight miles an hour — the benefits tend to go away (note we're talking about speed in long distance endurance running here, not interval sprinting). It won't make your health worse than a non-runner, but as Dr. O'Keefe says, if you put in that much effort, surely you'd want to get some benefit from it!

In order to obtain the health benefits and increased longevity from long distance running efforts, it seems to be best to limit your pace to six to seven miles per hour (about a ten-minute mile). Lastly, if you run seven days a week, the benefits also seem to disappear. The ideal amount was found to be between two to five days of exercise a week.

Another Danish study, also discussed by Dr. O'Keefe, found similar results. It followed 20,000 Danes since 1976, and found that joggers live about six years longer than non-runners, but again the benefit disappeared in those who overdid it... The best survival rates were among those who ran at a slow to average pace for a total of 1 to 2.5 hours per week, divided between two to three runs per week.

High Intensity Interval Training May Be the Ideal for Most

Mounting research is showing that the ideal form of exercise isn't related to long-distance endurance after all. Rather, short bursts of high intensity exercise has been shown to beat conventional cardio time and time again as the most effective and efficient form of exercise. It also provides health benefits you simply cannot get from regular aerobics, such as a tremendous boost in human growth hormone (HGH), aka the "fitness hormone."

According to fitness expert Phil Campbell and author of Ready Set Go, getting cardiovascular benefits actually requires working all three types of muscle fibers and their associated energy systems -- and this cannot be done with traditional cardio. Here's a quick review:

Slow twitch (red muscle): Activated by traditional strength training and cardio exercises
Fast twitch (white muscle): Activated by high intensity interval exercises (sprints)
Super-fast (white muscle): Consists of fast twitch AND super-fast fibers, activated by high intensity interval exercises

Unfortunately, most traditional cardio and strength training exercises work only red muscle fibers, completely missing your white muscle fibers, which then atrophy. If your fitness routine doesn't work your white muscle, you aren't really working your heart in the most beneficial way. Your heart has two different metabolic processes: the aerobic, which require oxygen for fuel, and the anaerobic, which do not require any oxygen.

Traditional strength training and cardio exercises work primarily the aerobic process and the slow twitch (red) muscle fibers. On the other hand, high intensity interval exercises work your aerobic AND your anaerobic processes, which is what you need for optimal cardiovascular benefit. This is why you may not see the results you desire even when you're spending an hour on the treadmill several times a week. You're only working HALF of your muscle fibers!

In the case of these kinds of Peak Fitness exercises, less is more, as you can get all the benefits you need in just a 20-minute session performed twice a week. In fact, you should not do these exercises more than three times a week, as if you do it more frequently than that you may actually do more harm than good -- similar to running marathons.

Your body needs regular amounts of stress like exercise to stay healthy, but if you give it more than you can handle you will actually lose your health. So it is really crucial to listen to your body and integrate the feedback into your exercise intensity and frequency. When you work out it is wise to really push as hard as you possibly can a few times a week but you need to wisely gauge your body's tolerance to this stress.

Improve Your Heart Health and Your Insulin Sensitivity

High intensity interval exercises offers pretty astounding benefits to your heart and risk of chronic diseases, like diabetes. A Canadian research team gathered several groups of volunteers, including sedentary but generally healthy middle-aged men and women, and patients of a similar age who had been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease3. The participants were asked to undertake a program of cycling intervals as their exclusive form of exercise.

After several weeks on the program, both the unfit volunteers and the cardiac patients showed significant improvements in their health and fitness. Most remarkably, the cardiac patients showed "significant improvements" in both heart and blood vessel functioning. And, contrary to what popular belief might dictate, the intense exercises did not cause any heart problems for any of the cardiac patients.

The conventional widely held belief is that the short exposure of the exercise actually helps insulate your heart from the intensity!

Equally remarkable were the results of yet another study, in which unfit but otherwise healthy middle-aged adults were able to improve their insulin sensitivity and blood sugar regulation after just two weeks of interval training (three sessions per week)4. A follow-up study5 also found that interval training positively impacted insulin sensitivity. In fact, the study involved people with full-blown type 2 diabetes, and just ONE interval training session was able to improve blood sugar regulation for the next 24 hours! This truly is amazing, and while aerobic fitness is indeed important, improving and maintaining good insulin sensitivity is perhaps one of the most important aspects of optimal health.

A Simple to Follow Approach to Peak Fitness and Longevity

If you are using exercise equipment, I recommend using a recumbent bicycle or an elliptical machine for your high-intensity interval training, although you certainly can use a treadmill, or sprint anywhere outdoors. Just beware that if you sprint outside, you must be very careful about stretching prior to sprinting. Also, unless you are already an athlete, I would strongly advise against sprinting outdoors, as several people I know became injured doing it the first time that way. For a demonstration using an elliptical machine, please see the following video. Here are the core principles:

Warm up for three minutes
Exercise as hard and fast as you can for 30 seconds. You should be gasping for breath and feel like you couldn't possibly go on another few seconds. It is better to use lower resistance and higher repetitions to increase your heart rate
Recover for 90 seconds, still moving, but at slower pace and decreased resistance
Repeat the high-intensity exercise and recovery 7 more times. (When you're first starting out, depending on your level of fitness, you may only be able to do two or three repetitions of the high-intensity intervals. As you get fitter, just keep adding repetitions until you're doing eight during your 20-minute session)
Cool down for a few minutes afterward by cutting down your intensity by 50-80 percent

If you have a history of heart disease or any medical concern please get clearance from your health care professional to start this. Most people of average fitness will be able to do it though; it is only a matter of how much time it will take you to build up to the full 8 reps. By the end of your 30-second high-intensity period you will want to reach these markers:
It will be relatively hard to breathe and talk because you are in oxygen debt.
You will start to sweat. Typically this occurs in the second or third repetition unless you have a thyroid issue and don't sweat much normally.
Your body temperature will rise.
Lactic acid increases and you will feel a muscle "burn."

The remarkable effectiveness of interval training makes logical sense when you consider that this type of exertion mimics how our ancestors lived. This is also how animals and young children behave naturally (long-duration exercise really isn't "natural"). By exercising in short bursts, followed by periods of recovery, you recreate exactly what your body needs for optimum health, and that includes the production of growth hormones, the burning of excess body fat, and improved cardiovascular health and stamina.

Remember to Add Variety to Your Exercise Program

In addition to doing high intensity interval exercises a couple of times a week, it's wise to alternate a wide variety of exercises in order to truly optimize your health. Without variety, your body will quickly adapt and the benefits will begin to plateau. As a general rule, as soon as an exercise becomes easy to complete, you need to increase the intensity and/or try another exercise to keep challenging your body. I recommend incorporating the following types of exercise into your program:

Interval (Anaerobic) Training: This is when you alternate short bursts of high-intensity exercise with gentle recovery periods.
Strength Training: You can actually "up" the intensity by slowing it down. For more information about using super slow weight training as a form of high-intensity interval exercise, please see my interview with Dr. Doug McGuff.
Core Exercises: Your body has 29 core muscles located mostly in your back, abdomen and pelvis. This group of muscles provides the foundation for movement throughout your entire body, and strengthening them can help protect and support your back, make your spine and body less prone to injury and help you gain greater balance and stability.

You need enough repetitions to exhaust your muscles. The weight should be heavy enough that this can be done in fewer than 12 repetitions, yet light enough to do a minimum of four repetitions. It is also important NOT to exercise the same muscle groups every day. They need at least two days of rest to recover, repair and rebuild.

Exercise programs like Pilates and yoga are also great for strengthening your core muscles, as are specific exercises you can learn from a personal trainer. In a related article, Pilates Platinum owner Healther Dorak shares three moves you can do at home or in the gym. To see a demonstration of each exercise, please check out the article posted on FitSugar.com6.

"Each of these three moves targets and challenges several different muscle groups at once so you get more bang for your buck," says Dorak. "Do this routine three times a week, and you'll start to strengthen and tone your abs, legs, glutes, and arms."

Stretching: My favorite type of stretching is active isolated stretches developed by Aaron Mattes. With Active Isolated Stretching, you hold each stretch for only two seconds, which works with your body's natural physiological makeup to improve circulation and increase the elasticity of muscle joints. This technique also allows your body to repair itself and prepare for daily activity. You can also use devices like the Power Plate to help you stretch.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Good fish, and bad fish.

PS: Jesus ate fish!

By Dr. Mercola

Fish has made the news a few times lately. Some say Americans aren't eating enough of it, while others warn of mercury dangers. It's certainly a complex issue, as waterways are increasingly polluted and so many people are deficient in the omega-3 fats critical for health...

So, should you or shouldn't you eat fish?

Here, I will review a few of the fundamentals that need to be factored in to help you optimize your diet while reducing your exposure to environmental toxins like methylmercury as much as possible.

Fish has always been the best source for the animal-based omega-3 fats EPA and DHA, but as levels of pollution have increased, this treasure of a food has become less and less viable as a primary source of healthful fats.

However, there are still exceptions, and the key is to understand which types of fish are the least contaminated.

Interestingly enough, and fortunately for us, the types of fish that tend to suffer the least amount of toxic contamination also happen to be some of the best sources of fat and antioxidants. So, by choosing wisely, the benefits of a diet high in fish can still outweigh the risks.

Vital Choice

In the video above, I interview Randy Hartnell, founder-president of Vital Choice Wild Seafood and Organics. I'm a huge fan of their sockeye salmon, and beside a fish dinner at a restaurant here or there, Vital Choice salmon is about the only type of fish I eat, for the very reasons mentioned above — it's less likely to be contaminated, for reasons I'll review in a moment, and the nutritional profile is far better than most other fish, including other types of salmon.

Hartnell spent more than 20 years as a commercial fisherman before forming his company in 2001, which features sustainably harvested wild salmon that are particularly low in heavy metals.

The reason he switched from being a commercial fisherman to a supplier was because farmed salmon exploded onto world markets, and quite simply crowded out the wild-caught variety. People typically didn't understand the difference between the two, and farmed salmon was (and still is) cheaper. In a matter of a few years, grocery stores and restaurants across the US and beyond had switched to farmed salmon.

"Out of frustration, I went out with a friend, and we just started traveling around the country. We'd go to food stores like Whole Foods or Wild Oats. We'd set up our grill out in front. We'd barbecue our wild salmon. And we'd tell the story why wild is better than farmed," Hartnell says.

"People were very receptive. Often we would hear, 'Well, this is great, but they hardly ever have it here. Where can I get it?' Over and over again, I'd hear it. I'd have to tell them, 'I'm sorry. I don't know.' Then one day, a light bulb went off, and I said, 'I can send it to you. I'll send you some.'"

The rest, as they say, is history. Shipping the highest quality possible wild-caught Alaskan salmon right to your door is now his primary business. You can learn more on his website, VitalChoice.com.

Why Wild-Caught Alaskan Sockeye Salmon is a Good Option

There are three major differences between wild-caught and farmed salmon, and once you realize how different the fish are, based on how they were raised, you'll see why opting for the cheaper alternative isn't the wisest choice:

Fish Health — Wild salmon return to their native spawning grounds each year, without you having to do anything, while farmed salmon are kept in pens. Naturally, fish swimming in the wild get more exercise, and this alone make wild fish healthier than their incarcerated counterparts. As explained by Tony Farrell1 with the University of British Columbia Zoology department, fish kept in constrained environments become the aquatic version of "couch potatoes," with similar health consequences as humans face when we don't exercise enough.

Recent research2 has shown that survival rates of fish that have received sufficient exercise is 13 percent higher than the "couch potato" controls, and the exercise-conditioned fish had better growth, and stronger immune systems, courtesy of certain gene activations.
Nutritional content — Wild salmon swim around in the wild, eating what nature programmed them to eat. Therefore, their nutritional profile is more complete, with micronutrients, fats, minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants like astaxanthin (which gives salmon its pink, or in the case of sockeye, red-colored, flesh).

Farmed salmon, on the other hand, are fed an artificial diet consisting of grain products like corn and soy (most of which is genetically modified), along with chicken- and feather meal, artificial coloring, and synthetic astaxanthin, which is not approved for human consumption, but is permitted to be used in fish feed.

Mother Nature never intended fish to eat these things, and as a consequence of this radically unnatural diet, the nutritional content of their flesh is also altered, and not for the better. Farmed salmon tastes different than wild-caught, and much of it has to do with the altered fat ratio, which is dramatically different. Farmed salmon contains far more omega-6, courtesy of their grain-based diet.

The ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fat of wild salmon is far superior to farmed. Wild salmon typically has 600 to 1,000 percent more omega-3s compared to omega-6s. So whereas farmed salmon has a 1 to 1 ratio of omega-3s and omega-6s — again due to its "junk food" diet — the ratio for wild sockeye salmon is between 6 and 9 to 1. This is important, because if you're trying to improve your omega-3 to omega-6 balance, you simply will not accomplish it with farmed salmon...
Environment — Probably around 99 percent of farmed salmon are raised in net pens in the open ocean. All the excess food that is dropped in ends up going out in the environment — the genetically engineered ingredients, the pesticides, the antibiotics and chemical additives. Anything the fish do not consume, along with all their now unnatural waste products, end up contaminating the environment. According to a new report from Scotland, some salmon farms have increased their use of pesticides 110 percent over the past four years, adding to the toxic burden of both the environment and your body. To learn more about the many hazards of fish farming, check out FarmedAndDangerous.org.3

There's also the vegetarian or vegan ethical aspect. Wild sockeye salmon are the vegetarians of the salmon world. Their diet consists of krill, plankton and algae, and they are caught at the very end of their life cycle. By the time they enter the fishing grounds, they've lived 95 percent of their natural life in the wild. At the end of their life, they fight their way up-river to spawn, after which they die a natural death — unless they're caught by a fisherman or get eaten by some other predator.

Beware of Mislabeled Salmon

Unfortunately, salmon are often mislabeled. According to Hartnell, studies have discovered that as much as 70 to 80 percent of the fish marked "wild" were actually farmed. This includes restaurants, where 90-95 percent of salmon is farmed, yet may be mis-listed on the menu as "wild." The following tips that can help you determine whether the salmon is authentically harvested Alaskan fish are:

Canned salmon labeled "Alaskan Salmon" is a good bet, as Alaskan salmon is not allowed to be farmed.
In restaurants, mislabeled salmon will typically be described as "wild" but not "wild Alaskan." This is because authentic "wild Alaskan" is easier to trace. The term "wild" is more nebulous and therefore more often misused. In many ways it is very similar to the highly abused "natural" designation.
Whether you're in a grocery store or a restaurant, ask the seafood clerk or waiter where the fish is from. If it's wild, they will have paid more for it, so they're likely to understand the value proposition. Since it's a selling point, they will know where it came from. If they don't have an answer for you, it's a red flag that it's farmed, or worse... The US Food and Drug Administration is moving forward with approving genetically engineered salmon to be sold, and as you know, GE foods still do not need to be labeled in the US.
Avoid Atlantic salmon, as all salmon labeled "Atlantic Salmon" currently comes from fish farms.
Sockeye salmon cannot be farmed, so if you find sockeye salmon, it's bound to be wild. You can tell sockeye salmon from other salmon by its color. It's bright red as opposed to pink. The reason again for this bright red color is its superior astaxanthin content. Sockeye salmon has one of the highest concentrations of astaxanthin of any food.

The Best and Worst Fish to Eat in Terms of Environmental Toxins

Most major waterways in the world are contaminated with mercury, heavy metals, and chemicals like dioxins, PCBs, and other agricultural chemicals that wind up in the environment. This is why, as a general rule, I no longer recommend getting your omega-3 requirements from fish. However, I do make two exceptions.

One is authentic, wild-caught Alaskan sockeye salmon; the nutritional benefits of which I believe still outweigh any potential contamination. The risk of sockeye accumulating high amounts of mercury and other toxins is reduced because of its short life cycle, which is only about three years. Additionally, bioaccumulation of toxins is also reduced by the fact that it doesn't feed on other, already contaminated, fish.

Whenever I consume fish, I always seek to consume it with a handful of chlorella tablets. The chlorella is a potent mercury binder and if taken with the fish will help bind the mercury before you are able to absorb it, so it can be safely excreted in your stool.

The second exception is smaller fish with short lifecycles, which also tend to be better alternatives in terms of fat content, so it's a win-win situation — lower contamination risk and higher nutritional value. A general guideline is that the closer to the bottom of the food chain the fish is, the less contamination it will have accumulated. This includes:

Sardines
Anchovies
Herring

If you insist on eating typical, store-bought fish and want to know more about the extent of your mercury exposure, I urge you to check out the online mercury calculator4 at GotMercury.org to get an idea of the risks. Additionally, as mentioned above, you may want to consider taking a natural mercury chelators with any fish dinner. This includes zeolite (green clay), chlorella, and fermented vegetables.

Larger fish, which tend to live longer and have the highest contamination levels and should be avoided include (please note this is not an exhaustive listing):
Tuna (tuna steaks, sushi, and canned) Sea bass and largemouth bass Marlin
Halibut Pike Walleye
Shark Sword fish White croaker

Do Detoxifying Nutrients in Fish Cancel Out Harm from Mercury Contamination?

While some believe that methylmercury in seafood is counteracted by other nutrients in the fish, such as selenium, which help your body eliminate the toxins, recent research has shown that this hypothesis is likely false. A French research team sought to determine whether mercury from fish is less harmful than other dietary mercury,5 and whether beneficial nutriments from fish might counterbalance the deleterious effects of fish-associated mercury. Mice were one of three diets:

Fish-based methylmercury diet: A diet that included fishmeal produced from fish containing five micrograms of methylmercury contamination per gram
Added methylmercury diet: A special diet higher in DHA and EPA, with added methylmercury chloride (considered more toxic than fish-associated methylmercury) also totaling five mcg/g
Control diet without mercury

Apart from mercury and selenium content, the three diets were comparable. Interestingly, only the fish group suffered significant behavioral abnormalities at the end of 58 days! The authors concluded:

"The two mercury-containing diets are differing by the fact that mercury was brought by the addition of either pure methylmercury chloride or by mercurial species associated to fish. Therefore, any differential effects observed between MeHg-containing and fish-containing diets should be attributed to different chemical species of mercury present in one diet and absent from the other and vice-versa along with the possible intervening role of fish PUFA and selenium.

If the beneficial role of fish nutriments such as PUFA and selenium was to counteract MeHg effects, the pattern of effects displayed after exposure to the fish-containing diet should appear less severe than that observed with the MeHg-containing diet. But in the present study, the mice fed the fish-containing diet displayed worse behavioral performances than those fed the control and the MeHg-containing diets, although the brain structures of both mercury-contaminated groups of mice contained comparable levels of mercury and even less in the striatum of those fed the fish diet.

Therefore, the different chemical species of mercury within fish flesh are likely to explain the deficit in cognitive performance in the Y maze and the decreased locomotory activity in the open-field maze."

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

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Dr Mercola comments/warns re: Obamacare -



By Dr. Mercola

There can be little doubt that we're in a health care crisis of massive proportions. The Affordable Health Care Act is the proposed solution, but to any person aware of the facts, it should be evident that so-called "ObamaCare" is NOT a viable solution.

Now that President Obama has won a second term, it is clear that the Affordable Care Act will be implemented in full force.

When this act was initially introduced, I described it as a mandatory tax despite the fact this was widely denied. Now it is widely accepted that the Affordable Health Care Act is indeed a mandatory insurance tax.

More importantly though, guaranteed health insurance does NOT equate to guaranteed health care. First of all, one of the key factors is access to health care providers, which is sorely lacking already.

Secondly, the Act will promote rather than solve the current problem of wasteful spending. If you didn't already know this, American medical care is the most expensive in the world. The U.S. spends more than twice as much on each person for health care as most other industrialized countries.

No strategies are included in the Act to actually prevent illness and reduce health care costs. Instead it expands an already flawed model of "care" that has been and continues to be one of the leading causes of death in the US!

$750 Billion Wasted Each Year

A recent review of U.S. healthcare expenses by the Institutes of Medicine1 revealed that 30 cents of every dollar spent on medical care is wasted, adding up to $750 billion annually. To get an understanding of how much money three-quarters of a trillion dollars really is, take a look at the video below.

If you think it's bad now, just wait until the Affordable Health Care Act gets implemented. There's nothing to prevent the wastefulness already inherent in the current Medicare and Medicaid system. Six major areas of waste identified in the report were:
Unnecessary services: $210 billion Inflated prices: $105 billion
Inefficient delivery of care: $130 billion Improper payments: $70 billion
Excess administrative costs: $190 billion Fraud: $75 billion



The United States spends $2.7 trillion annually — again, TWICE the amount per person as most other industrialized nations. If this spending actually resulted in Americans being among the healthiest people on the planet, I'd be all for it. After all, what is money if you don't have your health?

Unfortunately, that isn't the case. Using life expectancy as a barometer for the return of our investment, shows us that this expenditure is entirely in vain as the US life expectancy ranks 49th in the world, despite the fact that we're spending more on our health care than any nation on the planet.

The United States also gives newborn babies more vaccines than any other nation, yet as vaccination rates have risen, so has our infant mortality rates. In 1960, America ranked 12th in infant mortality among all nations of the world. By 2005, we had fallen to number 30. Today in America, there are more premature babies than ever before and more full term babies die before their first birthday than in most European countries. Is it possible that more is NOT better when it comes to inoculating our young against disease?

The US Health Care System — Not Only Inefficient, But Dangerous as Well

Inefficiency and wastefulness is one thing, but statistics also tell us that the US health care system as a whole is shockingly dangerous, in a number of different ways. For example, did you know that if you have Medicaid, you're twice as likely to die before you leave the hospital compared to those with private insurance? This again goes back to what I stated earlier, that guaranteed health insurance does not equate to guaranteed health care.

But that's not all. Medical mistakes occur across the board, regardless of what type of health insurance you have. An estimated 225,000 Americans die each year from medical mistakes, and the real number is likely far higher. I've worked in many inner city hospitals, and I can tell you a lot of medical mistakes, and resulting deaths, are covered up. All in all, medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death in the US.

This really should tell us something!

A sad example of this is the recent death of Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. Twelve years ago, she authored one of the best articles I've ever read documenting the tragedy of the traditional medical paradigm. It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Based on her article, I created a headline that has reverberated through the web ever since: Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US. Dr. Starfield's research documented how 225,000 Americans die from iatrogenic causes, i.e. their death is caused by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy.

Earlier this year, she became a victim of the very problem she sought to bring attention to... She died of a stroke after taking Plavix for about two years.

Over a decade ago, Professor Bruce Pomerance of the University of Toronto concluded that properly prescribed and correctly taken pharmaceutical drugs were the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. More recently, an article authored in two parts by Gary Null, PhD, Carolyn Dean, MD, ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD, describes in excruciating detail how the modern conventional American medical system has bumbled its way into becoming the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.

From medical errors to adverse drug reactions to unnecessary procedures, heart disease, cancer deaths and infant mortality, the authors took statistics straight from the most respected medical and scientific journals and investigative reports by the Institutes of Medicine (IOM), and showed that on the whole, American medicine caused more harm than good.

Health Care System has Not Gotten Any Safer Over Past Decade

In 2010, a new analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine2 found that, despite efforts to improve patient safety, the health care system hasn't changed much. In looking over record that spanned from 1976 to 2006 (the most recent year available) they found almost a quarter-million deaths annually were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors.

In all, there were over 25 injuries per 100 hospital admissions.

When you add up all the different numbers — and these are likely conservative numbers as they are several years old — you find that our current heath care system is responsible for over 780,000 deaths per year. There are significant costs associated with all these errors as well. For example, the cost of adverse drug reactions3 alone is more than $136 billion annually -- greater than the total cost of cardiovascular or diabetic care!

How can there be any doubt that this system, indeed the entire medical paradigm, isn't seriously flawed?

Flawed or Nonexistent Preventive Strategies Drive the System

Our current medical system fails to acknowledge prevention in any way, as does the Affordable Health Care Act. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 80 percent of deaths are associated with chronic disease. Allopathic medicine does well with acute illness and injury, but when it comes to chronic disease the system is an utter failure.

What does the Affordable Health Care Act have on prevention?

Besides tobacco awareness, which most people are fully aware of at this point anyway, the Act wants to address obesity. While this is admirable — after all, obesity is a significant risk factor of at least 20 different chronic diseases — the question is whether or not the system is capable of offering any real solutions.

To get an idea of this capability, let's look at how they've done so far.

One would think that since they control the entire system, including the food supply and federal policy relating to everything from food and drugs to pollution, effective measures based on accurate information would have a beneficial ripple effect. Alas, since the 1960's, when the low-fat myth became the "law of the land," obesity rates have skyrocketed, and are projected to hit 50 percent of the population in the next two decades! A sharp uptick can also be seen in the mid-90's when the first genetically engineered foods were introduced.

The Revolving Door Problem Ensures Nothing Changes

A major part of the problem is the revolving doors between our regulatory agencies and industry. This applies to all major industries, but the pharmaceutical industry in particular.

Most recently, Elizabeth Fowler, special assistant to the president for health care and economic policy and previously the deputy director for policy at the Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight of the Health and Human Services Department, announced that she would be leaving the White House to take a senior-level position leading “global health policy” with drug maker Johnson & Johnson’s government affairs and policy group. 4, 5

Fowler played an influential role in the development of the new health care reform and was even praised by Montana Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, for being the “architect of the legislation.”6 Interestingly, prior to her government work, Fowler worked for WellPoint, the largest health insurer in the United States, where she was vice president of public policy. Now, after a successful stint in the White House, she’ll be moving on to help lead health policy at Johnson & Johnson.

For several graphics detailing some of the other individuals playing both sides of the fence, please see this link. For example:

Julie Gerberding, former head of the CDC, a position she held for seven years, is now President of one of the largest drug companies in the world: Merck Vaccines
Dr. Elias Zerhouni, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is now President of Global Research and Development for drug company giant Sanofi
Dr. Gary Nabel also worked at the NIH as the Director of Vaccines, but just a few weeks ago joined Dr. Zerhouni as the chief science officer at Sanofi
Dr. Gregory Geba, MD worked for Merck and was the lead author on studies showing Vioxx was toxic. Yet he did nothing. Vioxx subsequently killed 60,000 people before it was withdrawn. On July 15, 2012, Dr. Geba was appointed FDA Director of the Office of Generic Drugs

Quite simply, there is massive collusion going on, which ensures not just the profitability of Big Pharma and the medical industry as a whole, but also Big Ag, which is another major culprit behind the nation’s poor health. The ultimate price for this collusion and undermining of truth is not just your money but also your health. It’s a for-profit scheme, and healthy people do not make good customers.

So, considering the fact that the pharmaceutical industry effectively runs the entire medical system, how are the drug companies doing in their quest to deliver you from illness?

Well, according to our judicial system, not so well. And that’s besides the statistics of injuries and death associated with their products. The following chart lists fines levied against pharmaceutical companies for various criminal activities relating to their drugs — including conspiracy and fraud — over the past six years alone.

Drug Company Fines

Year Company Drug Fine
2012 GlaxoSmithKline Avandia $3 Billion
2012 Abbot Depakote $1.6 Billion
2011 Merck Vioxx $950 Million
2010 Allergan Botox $600 Million
2009 Pfizer Bextra $2.3 Billion
2007 Bristol Meyers Abilify $515 Million
2007 Purdue Oxycontin $635 Million
2006 Serono Laboratories Serostim $704 Million7

Most of the Leading Causes of Death are Preventable

Fortunately, there IS light at the end of the tunnel. You CAN take control of your health — you don't have to listen to and abide by this system that makes and keeps you sick in order to make corporations wealthy. President Reagan once said:

"Government does not solve problems, it subsidizes them. A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth."

As previously stated, the majority of deaths are due to chronic, not acute, disease. And most chronic diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, are largely preventable with simple lifestyle changes. Even infectious diseases like the flu can often be warded off by a healthy way of life.

Imagine the lowered death toll, not to mention costs to the economy, if more people decided to take control of their health … heart disease and cancer alone accounted for 47 percent of deaths in the United States in 2010, and there are many strategies you can implement to lower your risk of these diseases. The added bonus to this is that the healthier you are, the less you will need to rely on conventional medical care, which is a leading cause of death.

So what does a "healthy lifestyle" entail? The following is a short list of the basics expounded upon in my nutrition plan:

Proper Food Choices

For a comprehensive guide on which foods to eat and which to avoid, see my nutrition plan. It's available for free, and is perhaps one of the most comprehensive and all-inclusive guides on a healthy lifestyle out there. Generally speaking, you should be looking to focus your diet on whole, ideally organic, unprocessed foods that come from healthy, sustainable, local sources.

For the best nutrition and health benefits, you will want to eat a good portion of your food raw. Nearly as important as knowing which foods to eat more of is knowing which foods to avoid, and topping the list is fructose. Sugar, and fructose in particular, can act as a toxin in and of itself when consumed in excess, and as such drive multiple disease processes in your body, not the least of which is insulin resistance, a major cause of accelerated aging and virtually all chronic disease.
Comprehensive Exercise Program, including High-Intensity Exercise

Even if you're eating the healthiest diet in the world, you still need to exercise to reach the highest levels of health, and you need to be exercising effectively, which means including not only core-strengthening exercises, strength training, and stretching but also high-intensity activities into your rotation. High-intensity interval-type training boosts human growth hormone (HGH) production, which is essential for optimal health, strength and vigor. I've discussed the importance of Peak Fitness for your health on numerous occasions, so for more information, please review this previous article.
Stress Reduction and Positive Thinking

You cannot be optimally healthy if you avoid addressing the emotional component of your health and longevity, as your emotional state plays a role in nearly every physical disease -- from heart disease and depression, to arthritis and cancer. Effective coping mechanisms are a major longevity-promoting factor in part because stress has a direct impact on inflammation, which in turn underlies many of the chronic diseases that kill people prematurely every day. Meditation, prayer, energy psychology tools such as the Emotional Freedom Technique, social support and exercise are all viable options that can help you maintain emotional and mental equilibrium.
Optimize Vitamin D with Proper Sun Exposure

We have long known that it is best to get your vitamin D from appropriate sun exposure during times when UVB rays are present. Vitamin D plays an important role in preventing numerous illnesses ranging from cancer to the flu.

The important factor when it comes to vitamin D is your serum level, which should ideally be between 50-70 ng/ml year-round. Sun exposure or a safe tanning bed is the preferred method for optimizing vitamin D levels, but a vitamin D3 supplement can be used as a last resort. Most adults need about 8,000 IU's of vitamin D a day to achieve serum levels above 40 ng/ml, which is still just below the minimum recommended serum level of 50 ng/ml.
High Quality Animal-Based Omega-3 Fats

Animal-based omega-3 fat like krill oil is a strong factor in helping people live longer, and many experts believe that it is likely the predominant reason why the Japanese are the longest lived race on the planet.
Avoid as Many Chemicals, Toxins, and Pollutants as Possible

This includes tossing out your toxic household cleaners, soaps, personal hygiene products, air fresheners, bug sprays, lawn pesticides, and insecticides, just to name a few, and replacing them with non-toxic alternatives.

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Re: Dr. MERCOLA --> alternative health and fitness

Post by Etosha »

Excellen post, thank you!

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