Watchman News

By Dr. Mercola

I’ve long said that the best strategy for achieving health is avoiding a visit to your doctor in the first place. Why? Because in many cases you will simply leave the office with a prescription or two, which will rarely solve your health problem. Most doctor visits result in “solutions” that only suppress your symptoms, often causing other side effects and problems.
Rather than advise patients about the true underlying conditions and real solutions that lead to health, they are left putting toxic Band-Aids on gaping wounds. As shown in the slideshow above, and as I detail in depth below, there are actually many reasons why avoiding your doctor may be in the best interest of your health …

1. Annual Pap Smears

Many physicians still advise women to receive yearly pap smears, but the newest guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force specifically recommend against this. The new recommendations call for women to undergo PAP screening only once every three years, beginning at age 21 and ending around age 65.
When testing is more frequent, or started before age 21, there’s a chance of detecting human papillomavirus (HPV), and associatedlesions, more frequently. If a physician detects such lesions, they will assume they are “pre-cancerous” and treat them accordingly. However, most HPV infections and associated low grade squamous intra-epithelial lesions clear up on their own without treatment,1 while the treatment itself can lead to cervical incompetence and/or miscarriage in the future. Since most cases of HPV clear up on their own, this is a case where the treatment may do more harm than good.
That said, PAP smears (which screen for cervical cancer typically associated with HPV) are one of the best tools for preventing cervical cancer deaths – but getting one every year is likely unnecessary.
Evidence shows that screening women for cervical cancer more frequently than every three years does not detect more cancer. Women who have not been exposed to HPV are not at risk for cervical cancer. Further, even if you are exposed and the infection does not clear up on its own (which is not common), it can take 10 years before it progresses to cancer. Cervical cancers are very slow growing, which is why less frequent PAP screens are still effective.
Despite the new PAP screen guidelines, most physicians continue to recommend annual PAP screening to their patients, mostly because they (and their patients) are in the habit of doing so. Some physicians also fear their patients will not come in for annual exams and other screening if the PAP is not required every year.
There is also a good deal of evidence that the revised PAP guidelines are part of a plan to rescue Gardasil (HPV) vaccine sales, which are embarrassingly low. The HPV vaccine is a heavily promoted and very expensive vaccine, but it has been a flop, with less than 27 percent of women opting to receive it, and reports of serious adverse effects continuing to pour in.

2. Mammograms

Only about 1 in 8 women whose breast cancer was identified during a routine mammogram actually had their lives “saved” by the screening, a recent analysis estimated2 – and this does not accurately account for how many women will fall victim to mammogram-induced breast cancer.
Using breast cancer data from The National Cancer Institute and The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers calculated a 50-year-old woman’s likelihood of developing breast cancer in the next 10 years, the odds the cancer would be detected by mammography, and her risk of dying from the cancer over 20 years.
They found that a mammogram has, at best, only a 13 percent probability of saving her life, and that the probability may actually be as low as 3 percent. No matter what analyses they used, including considering women of different ages, the probability of a mammogram saving a life remained below 25 percent. Researchers concluded:
“Most women with screen-detected breast cancer have not had their life saved by screening. They are instead either diagnosed early (with no effect on their mortality) or overdiagnosed.”
This bears repeating:
Mammograms often diagnose lesions or tumors that may never threaten a woman’s life. They also often result in false positives that lead to over-treatment, i.e. misdiagnosed women often undergo unnecessary mastectomies, lumpectomies, radiation treatments and chemotherapy, which can have a devastating effect on both the quality and length of their lives. Plus, a mammogram uses ionizing radiation, which in and of itself can either induce or contribute to the development of breast cancer.

3. Cold and Flu

Think it’s wise to go to a conventional physician for these? Think again. Thanks to routine over-prescription of antibiotics, and the prescription of inappropriate antibiotics, you’re likely to walk away after being told to take a drug you don’t actually need.
Antibiotics do NOT work against viruses, hence they are useless against colds and flu’s. Unfortunately antibiotics are vastly over-prescribed for this purpose. If you have a cold or flu, remember that unless you have a serious secondary bacterial pneumonia, an antibiotic will likely do far more harm than good, because whenever you use an antibiotic, you’re increasing your susceptibility to developing infections with resistance to that antibiotic — and you can become the carrier of this resistant bug, and can spread it to others.
The first thing you want to do when you feel yourself coming down with a cold or flu is to avoid ALL sugars, artificial sweeteners, and processed foods. Sugar is particularly damaging to your immune system — which needs to be ramped up, not suppressed, in order to combat an emerging infection. This includes fructose from fruit juice, and all types of grains (as they break down into sugar (glucose) in your body).
Ideally, you must address nutrition, sleep, exercise and stress issues the moment you first feel yourself getting a bug. Getting plenty of high quality sleep will be crucial to your recovery. This is when immune-enhancing strategies will be most effective. In addition, the research is quite clear that the higher your vitamin D level, the lower your risk of contracting colds, flu, and other respiratory tract infections. I strongly believe you could avoid colds and influenza entirely by maintaining your vitamin D level in the optimal range.

4. Cholesterol

Many doctors are unaware that a high-fat diet is NOT the cause of heart disease. They are fooled into believing that total cholesterol is an accurate predictor of heart disease. If you visit your physician and you have high cholesterol, you’re likely to be told two things:

Take a statin cholesterol-lowering drug and
Don’t eat saturated fat.

While statin drugs do lower cholesterol very effectively, cholesterol is not the culprit in heart disease. Plus a report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims that no study has ever proven that statins improve all-cause mortality3 — in other words, they don’t prolong your life any longer than if you’d not taken them at all. And rather than improving your life, they actually contribute to a deterioration in the quality of your life, destroying muscles and endangering liver, kidney and even heart function. The best ways to optimize your cholesterol levels and your heart health have to do with lifestyle measures, including eating healthy minimally processed fats and avoid highly processed vegetable fats and oils that are loaded with toxic omega-6 fats.

5. Depression

Once again, you’re more likely to leave the doctor’s office with a prescription for a drug that could be more dangerous than the problem itself. Every year, 230 million prescriptions for antidepressants are filled, making them one of the most prescribed drugs in the United States. The psychiatric industry itself is a $330 billion industry—not bad for an enterprise that offers little in the way of cures.
Despite all of these prescriptions, more than one in 20 Americans are depressed.4 Of those depressed Americans, 80 percent say they have some level of functional impairment, and 27 percent say their condition makes it extremely difficult to do everyday tasks like work, activities of daily living, and getting along with others.
The use of antidepressant drugs—medicine’s answer for depression—doubled in just one decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005.
If these drugs are so extensively prescribed, then why are so many people feeling so low?
Because they don’t work at addressing the cause.
Research has confirmed that antidepressant drugs are no more effective than sugar pills. Some studies have even found that sugar pills may produce BETTER results than antidepressants! Personally, I believe the reason for this astounding finding is that both pills work via the placebo effect, but the sugar pills produce far fewer adverse effects.
Many people forget that antidepressants come with a slew of side effects, some of which are deadly. Approximately 750,000 people attempt suicide each year in the US, and about 30,000 of those succeed. Taking a drug that is unlikely to relieve your symptoms and may actually increase your risk of killing yourself certainly does not seem like a good choice. In addition, since most of the treatment focus is on drugs, many safe and natural treatment options that DO work — like exercise, the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), vitamin D, and proper nutrition — are completely ignored.

6. High Blood Pressure

The definition of what constitutes high blood pressure expanded greatly in 2003, so that drug companies could sell drugs loaded with side effects to 45 million extra people. Because the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (rife with drug industry conflicts of interest) decided that what were in actuality relatively low blood pressure readings were a risk for heart disease, millions more over the years, were suddenly labeled abnormal, and in need of “treatment” for a condition that didn’t exist in medical literature until that panel met.
Uncontrolled high blood pressure is a very serious health concern that can lead to heart disease and increase your risk of having a stroke. The good news though is that following a healthy nutrition plan, along with exercising and implementing effective stress reduction techniques will normalize blood pressure in most people.

7. PSA Tests for Prostate Cancer

These tests actually reveal very little, and an irrelevant positive result will likely lead to a biopsy that comes with infection risk. The prostate-specific antigen test (PSA test), analyzes your blood for prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a substance produced by your prostate gland. When higher-than-normal levels of PSA are detected, it is believed that cancer is present. However, PSA screening barely has any impact on mortality rates from prostate cancer. As a result, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force will soon recommend that men not get screened for prostate cancer.
Today, many experts agree that PSA testing is unreliable at best and useless at worst for accurately diagnosing prostate cancer. Many also agree that routine PSA blood tests often lead to over-diagnosis of prostate cancer, resulting in unnecessary treatments. Similar to mammograms, the PSA screen has become little more than an up-sell technique. The false positive rate is high, and the bulk of the harm is a result of subsequent unnecessary treatments.
Diet is actually a factor that can greatly impact your prostate health and help prevent enlarged prostate and prostate cancer, but many physicians fail to address this.
You’ll want to eat as much organic (preferably raw) food as possible, and liberally include fresh herbs and spices, such as ginger. Make sure to limit carbohydrates like sugar/fructose and grains as much as possible to maintain optimal insulin levels, which will help reduce your cancer risk in general. Highly processed or charcoaled meats, pasteurized dairy products, and synthetic trans fats correlate with an increased risk for prostate cancer and should also be avoided.

8. Inappropriate and Unwise Dietary Advice

Most doctors are clueless about what constitutes a healthy diet. As such, they will recommend health catastrophes like artificial sweeteners, vegetable oils in lieu of butter, and fat-free pasteurized dairy products. Most will also neglect to tell you about the foods you could be eating more of to optimize your health, like fermented vegetables, raw dairy products, healthy fats (like saturated and animal-based omega-3s), grass-fed beef and more.
In addition, most are ignorant about the importance of how to cook your food – most foods are best consumed when raw or only lightly cooked, and this includes animal proteins like eggs and meat. A discussion about food quality is essential to health (i.e. getting your meat from a small local farmer instead of a confined animal feeding operation (CAFO)) but you will almost never hear this from your family physician. Wondering how to truly eat healthy? See my nutrition plan for a comprehensive (and free) guide.

9. Prescription Drugs Might Kill You and They Don’t Address the Cause of the Problem

A drug prescription is usually a Band-Aid that gets nowhere near the root cause of illness. And many drugs are dangerous. Last year an analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC) revealed that deaths from properly prescribed drugs now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States! And when you add in deaths attributable to other medical care modalities, like hospital admissions and surgery, the modern medical system becomes the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.
Authored in two parts by Gary Null, PhD, Carolyn Dean, MD ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD, the comprehensive Death by Medicine article described in excruciating detail how everything from medical errors to adverse drug reactions to unnecessary procedures caused more harm than good. That was in 2003. In 2010, an analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine found that, despite efforts to improve patient safety in the past few years, the health care system hasn’t changed much at all.5
For one of many examples, the birth control pills Yaz and Yasmin, which have been endorsed by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee, contain a drug called drospirenone that makes women who take it nearly seven times more likely to develop thromboembolism. This is an obstruction of a blood vessel that can lead to deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, stroke, heart attack and death.
Why did the FDA approve this dangerous drug? It turns out that at least four members of the advisory committee have either done work for the drugs’ manufacturers or licensees, or received research funding from them. According to the Alliance for Natural Health:

“Each of those four panelists who received money from the pill’s manufacturer voted in favor of the pill. Interestingly, the committee’s ruling that the drug’s benefit outweighs the risks was decided by a four-vote margin. Ironically, while the FDA allowed voting by advisors with business connections to drospirenone, the agency barred … Sidney M. Wolfe, on the grounds that he … had advised his readers not to take Yaz based on several years of data.”

10. Your Doctor Might Not Even Tell You the Truth

A U.S. telephone survey found that 79 percent of Americans trust their doctor.6 But a recent survey of 1,900 physicians revealed that some are not always open or honest with their patients The results were less than impressive, to put it mildly:

One-third of physicians did not completely agree with disclosing serious medical errors to patients
One-fifth did not completely agree that physicians should never tell a patient something untrue
Amazingly 40% believed that they should hide their financial relationships with drug and device companies to patients
Ten percent said they had told patients something untrue in the previous year

When making health care decisions, you should certainly get your physicians’ advice — that’s what you’re paying them for, after all. Hopefully you have chosen a health care provider who has similar philosophies about health as you do, and whose expertise you can trust. But remember that when making health care decisions, you must be your own advocate; it’s important to ask questions before opting for tests, procedures or treatments, and it’s your decision if you’d rather opt for less medical intervention while choosing a more natural way of healing your body.
Ultimately, the more you take responsibility for your own health — in the form of nurturing your body to prevent disease — the less you need to rely on the “disease care” that passes for health care in the United States. If you carefully follow some basic health principles — simple things like exercising, eating whole foods, sleeping enough, getting sun exposure, reducing stress in your life, and nurturing personal relationships — you will drastically reduce your need for conventional medical care, which in and of itself will reduce your chances of suffering ill side effects.
But in the event you do need medical care, seek a health care practitioner who will help you move toward complete wellness by helping you discover and understand the hidden causes of your health challenges … and create a customized and comprehensive — i.e. holistic — treatment plan for you.

By Dr. Mercola

Ellen Brown is a civil litigation attorney who has written 11 books on health and the politics of health, including the Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System (which focuses on the money and banking system itself), and Forbidden Medicine, which traces the suppression of natural health treatment back to the corrupting influences of our financial system.
In the course of writing her books, Brown was asked to join the legal team of Jimmy Keller, an alternative cancer therapist in Tijuana, who was jailed for, as she puts it, “the alleged crime of representing that he had a high rate of cure for cancer.”

“He always showed the movie World Without Cancer to his patients, which is by Ed Griffin,” she says, “so I read the book World Without Cancer, and it linked the cancer industry—the cancer cartel, basically—with the banking cartel. It showed they had the same roots.
It went back to the Rockefeller-Morgan cartel at the turn of the 20th century. Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie supported drugs, funded the medical schools, and basically got the homeopathic schools shut down. (In the 19th century, the homeopathic schools were the leading health treatment.)
… I realized in the course of that that if you wanted to get to crux of the problem, you had to deal with banking, because that was actually where they got their power. They got their power from the power to create money.”

The Shocking Truth about Our Money System, and the Power it Wields Over Your Health

As Brown explains, the shocking truth about our money system is that virtually all of our money is created by banks when they make loans. It’s not created by the government, as most people believe. The way it works is that, while the banks create the principal, they don’t create the interest, so they’re always getting more back than they’re putting out.

“The thing that most people don’t realize is that banks don’t just take in people’s money, and then lend it out again,” Brown explains. “What they do is, literally, every time they make a loan, they create that money on their books. They need the deposits in order to clear the checks, but they’re basically double-counting the money.
… When you’ve put your money in the bank and then you go to withdraw it, they never say, “Sorry, we just lent your money out to your neighbor for 30 years. You’ll have to come back later.” No, they always give you your money. That’s because your deposit’s still there at the same time that they’ve lent it out. So, if you need the money, then they’ll borrow it from somewhere else. But where do they borrow it from? Basically, from the very bank that the check just went into from the loan that they just made.
It’s like a big check-kiting scheme, where you create the money; it goes into another bank; and then you borrow it back. The banks can borrow it back at 0.25 percent at the moment, which is the Fed funds rate. And of course, they lend it out at five percent, or on credit cards 18 percent… or outrageous industry rates. They get a huge spread on money that didn’t actually exist until they created the loan.
… Their control over money is how they manage to corner politics, buy up the media, and basically monopolize the field.”

The Links Between Big Banks and the Drug Industry

Two good primers if you want to learn more about the banking system and the link between the pharmaceutical industry and banking, are The Creature from Jekyll Island, and World Without Cancer.
To me, this link between banking and Big Pharma intuitively makes sense. It was just earlier this year that I came to appreciate what Brown is talking about here. While the focus of this web site is on the damage done by the drug companies, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the banking system is the behemoth backing the Goliath-like drug industry.
As explained by Brown, the drug connection goes back to the 19th century. John D. Rockefeller’s father was actually, literally, a snake-oil salesman.

“He was a patent remedy seller. The drugs, of course, are oil-based, and John D. Rockefeller was an oil magnate. He also had a bank. So did J.P. Morgan. The drug industry—the patent remedy industry—was in competition with the natural herbal remedies, and the homeopathic remedies. And the way they prevailed in the whole system was that, first of all, they funded the American Medical Association—the AMA Journal, which got their funding from advertising. And if your drug was advertised in the AMA Journal, then you’ve got the AMA’s seal of endorsement… It was a cartel.”

Where the Federal Reserve Fits in

In this interview, Brown discusses far more than I have included here, so to learn more, I urge you to listen to this fascinating interview in its entirety. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to discuss the financial system without touching on the Federal Reserve. According to Brown, there’s an important distinction that needs to be understood regarding the role of the Federal Reserve, because while both banks and the Fed are creating money out of thin air, there are some differences:

“The Federal Reserve is the lender of last resort, so it is allowed to [create money] without actually backing the money from anywhere… There are basically two banking systems.
This is also very complicated, but there is what’s called ‘base money,’ and that’s created by the Federal Reserve. Those are the banks’ reserves. At one time the reserves were gold. You actually, literally, had to keep a certain amount of gold for your depositors, who could cash in their dollars for gold. But in 1933, everybody stopped trusting the banks, because they knew they didn’t have enough gold, so there were runs on the banks. At that time the dollar was 40 percent backed by gold. So, every time somebody would bring two dollars and cash it in for gold, the bank had to call in three dollars’ worth of loans. The whole money supply was just closing in on itself and collapsing.
That’s why Roosevelt finally took the dollar off the gold standard.
Then, to back the dollar, the Fed created “base money” for the banks to use as reserves.  But it’s a separate system. We don’t actually get to borrow the Fed’s reserves. That’s the bankers’ money. The bankers’ bank is the Federal Reserve.” 

The Economics of Our Medical System and the Drug Cartel

While at UCLA law school, Brown wrote an article about the economics of California’s regulations on doctors and other medical professions, and how these regulations effectively eliminate all competition to the conventional medical paradigm.  It may not be immediately apparent, but the medical profession is very cleverly manipulated and influenced in such a way as to bolster profits for the pharmaceutical industry. It’s a tightly controlled profession, and any competition—such as alternative or integrative treatments related to natural health—is more or less illegal. You cannot claim to treat disease without a medical license.

 “I think what’s even worse than that is they control information,” Brown says. “People don’t even know that there are alternative remedies. Or if they do hear about them, they think it’s quackery, and that it’s been disproven, because that’s what the conventional media says [which is largely owned by the same banking cartel as the pharmaceutical industry is]. You really have to dig to find out what’s out there, and how well natural remedies work. Also, you have to dig to find out how drugs don’t work, and how they’ve been over-hyped…”

How Can You Protect Your Health Freedom and Personal Liberty?

When asked to provide some recommendations for what you can do right now to take control of your own health, and how we can win this war on health freedom and personal liberty, Brown shares the following:

“I think the first thing you need to do… is get on the Internet and research what’s [been] done before; what the downside of the drug treatment that they’re trying to recommend for your condition is, for example.
Then we really seriously need to get organized. I was in the alternative healthcare movement for a long time. It seemed to me that the medical doctors were all literally brainwashed… They keep you up all night, because you have to do your rounds… and then, you’re force-fed this information. You want to pass the test; you haven’t had enough sleep; you’re looking at this data, and it says, “All right, give this drug for this condition.” You just accept that, because you’re sort of dazed, locked in a medical school.
The doctors are all trained in one discipline…
They won’t testify against each other in court. And so they’re like this strong wall of solidarity versus all the alternative people, who are all like mavericks and geniuses in their way but they all think the others are quacks. We need to, in some way, form a movement where we have to agree on some basics and worry about the details later. We need a big umbrella that accepts what we’re going to [focus on]… We want something that’s for the body; that helps the body do what it’s trying to do.
Another thing is the cost. American medicine is the costliest in the world, and we do not get the best results. Body-supporting therapies are cheaper than the drugs that are trying to block what the body’s trying to do. Things that block what the body’s trying to do make you unhealthier, which means you have to add more treatment, which means you have to be hospitalized more often, and which means you run up more bills.
We could save a lot of money if our whole approach was to support what the body’s trying to do.
Natural treatments would be much cheaper for the whole country. We cannot afford our healthcare right now, so something has to be done about this whole parasitic medical system; the parasitic banking system; and the parasitic insurance scheme that is draining the profits out of our economy.”

An Alternative Banking Plan that Could Save America, and the World

Brown is also the president of The Public Banking Institute, which stands poised to serve as a powerful part of the solution to the financial debacle we’re currently in, not just in the US, but worldwide. From her research, she came to the conclusion that the main problem plaguing our financial system is the massive interest going into private coffers, and the remedy for that is to replace the privately owned banking system with a public one. She explains:

“After the whole system collapsed in the fall of 2008,… I became aware that there was one state that actually escaped the credit crisis, and that was the only state that had a publicly owned bank—North Dakota. The Bank of North Dakota is owned by the state. They’ve had this bank in place since 1919.
… The private banks are always siphoning off this extra money in interest that they don’t create as principal when they make loans.  But if you have a public system—if banking [and]… credit were a public utility just like water should be, or electricity or highways… these are all blood systems of the economy—if money and credit were considered public utility, owned by the public, then the interest would go back to the public.
That is a sustainable system.
The original model is Benjamin Franklin’s Colony of Pennsylvania, which owned its own bank. The government both printed money, the way all the colonies did… [and] it had a bank. So the bank lent the money, and the money came back to the government. The interest was sufficient to fund the government. During that period, the colonists paid no taxes, they had no government debt, and prices did not inflate. It was a sustainable model.”

From that idea, the Public Banking Institute developed the Return to Prosperity Plan.
It sounds incredible, but 40 percent of the cost of everything we buy is interest, according to research by Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher. This interest is entirely hidden, so you don’t know you’re paying it. This is because at every stage of development of a product, interest is paid, again and again. For example, a business must typically take out a loan in order to pay for raw materials and the workforce before it can have a final product to sell. The same goes for each of the businesses in the supply chain, and for each and every retailer.

“If the state owned the bank… then the people get the interest back…” Brown explains. “For example, in North Dakota, the state’s revenues, by law, go into the Bank of North Dakota, so they have a huge deposit base and a huge capital base….
That means the state could save 40 percent on its projects, which means we could either cut taxes by 40 percent, or we could have 40 percent more services provided with the same amount of taxes that we pay now.  We just have to change bankers. Instead of banking with Wall Street, we should be banking in our own bank (where we get the profits) or cooperative system (where it all comes back). Banking, instead of feeding off the economy, should feed the economy.  And it could be a sustainable system.”

More Information

According to Brown, 18 states have now introduced bills of one sort or another for state-owned banks. And the Public Banking Institute, which is run entirely by volunteers, is continuing to work on furthering this plan.

“We have a very active group,” she says. “People get really excited about this idea. We’ve got representatives all over the country and groups you can join if you want.”

To learn more, please refer to their web site.
I’ve long been aware of the challenges with our whole economic model, but I’ve only recently begun to appreciate the connection between the banking industry and health, as discussed in this interview. Again, I highly recommend listening to it in its entirety, or reading through the transcript, to get a broader view.
The problem is so vast, and that’s true for just about every problem we have these days. But a large portion of it can be traced back to an unsustainable, unscrupulous, parasitic, private banking system that does not benefit those who use it! It has become a fundamental pernicious evil that’s ruining our culture. I think once people understand the concept proposed by this “Return to Prosperity Plan” at a deeper level, it’s going to be an easy step to switch over. But of course, there’s the logistics of educating the public on how it works, and then developing the funding to get these ballot initiatives passed in each individual state.
But I think it’s a marvelous model, and I applaud Brown for what she’s doing to really wake us up—both to the roots of the problem and to sustainable solutions.
My approach as a physician is to treat the root cause of the problem. If you just treat symptoms like the drug model is doing, the industry makes obscene profits while the public health continues to suffer and decline. In many ways, we’ve done the same thing with Wall Street. We’re not treating the root problem, namely a corrupted banking system, which is what Brown’s Institute and economic plan addresses head on.
Creating a nation-wide public banking system for each state seems like a marvelous solution, and we know it works—it’s been proven in North Dakota.  State banks can be more easily monitored than a nationalized bank, while providing more diversity to cater to each state’s own economic model.
To learn more about Ellen’s work, please see her web site, which contains more than 130 articles—mostly on banking, but also some on health—and over 500 interviews.

By Dr. Mercola

For many years now, my favorite source of omega-3 fats has been krill oil. Every time a new study about krill oil hits the journals, its list of health benefits grows longer and the differences between fish oil and krill oil become more pronounced.
Krill oil is often compared to fish oil as a source of animal-based omega-3 fats.
But krill consistently comes out on top in the research—and the latest study published in the July 2011 issue of Frontiers in Genetics1 is no exception. This study compared the livers of mice fed krill oil to those fed fish oil by looking at the gene expression triggered by each.
Researchers found that krill oil is VASTLY superior to fish oil when it comes to influencing your genes. What do your genes have to do with your metabolism? Everything! Every aspect of your metabolism is controlled by how your genes express themselves.

New Study Shows Krill Oil Flips on Key Metabolic Genes
Genes have “switches” that can be flipped on and off, which control virtually every biochemical process in your body. And nutrients like omega-3 fats control those switches. Your liver plays a major role in controlling how your body uses carbohydrates and lipids, utilizing omega-3 and omega-6 fats to sense your nutritional state and influence gene expression accordingly.
Fatty acids help to direct key metabolic processes such as glucose production, lipid synthesis, cellular energy, oxidation, and dozens of others. We now know that various types and sources of omega-3 fat affect liver tissue differently, which is what this study was designed to examine.
Krill oil actually influences your metabolism and genes to improve! The referenced study found that, although both fish oil and krill oil contain omega-3s, they differ greatly in how they affect the genes controlling your metabolism. Krill oil:

Enhances glucose metabolism in your liver, whereas fish oil does not
Promotes lipid metabolism, whereas fish oil does not
Helps regulate the mitochondrial respiratory chain, whereas fish oil does not
Decreases cholesterol synthesis, whereas fish oil increases it

So, krill will help lower your triglyceride and cholesterol levels and increase your energy production, whereas fish oil does neither and in fact may even raise your cholesterol level, according to the latest research. According to the researchers:

“Elevated hepatic glucose production is associated with metabolic disease in humans (Natali and Ferrannini, 2006), and we observed that krill oil supplementation favorably alters the expression of genes regulating hepatic glucose metabolism.”

Prior studies show that krill oil may lower your blood glucose level by increasing glucose uptake by tissues other than your liver. In another study that directly compared krill oil with fish oil, krill oil was significantly more effective in reducing liver triglyceride levels. These studies all suggest krill oil may offer significant benefits for those with the metabolic dysregulation seen in obesity and type 2 diabetes—which is a problem of epidemic proportions in today’s world.
Omega-3 fats affect your cellular health and DNA chiefly by how they influence your cell membranes. It is these cell membranes that are critical in switching your genes on and off, because the membranes contain receptors that respond to hormones and other agents, and these are affected by the fatty acids on their surface. Your cell membranes contain EPA, DHA and phospholipids, and all help to shuttle molecules into and out of your cells. Therefore, having ample high quality fatty acids in your system is crucial to keeping your cell membranes working like well-oiled little machines.

Other Advantages of Krill
It is important to understand that krill oil has a number of other advantages over fish oil:

1. Some studies have shown that krill oil may be 48 times more potent than fish oil. This means you need far less of it than fish oil, as confirmed by a 2011 study published in the journal Lipids2.

2. This is because krill oil contains phospholipids, so the omega-3 fats are already in the form that your body can use. This bioavailability means krill oil is absorbed very quickly and crosses your blood-brain barrier, so is able to reach important brain structures. Also, phospholipids are one of the principle compounds in high-density lipoproteins (HDL), which you want more of.

3. Fish oil is quite prone to oxidation, and oxidation leads to the formation of free radicals. Consuming free radicals further increases your need for antioxidants. Fish oil is weak in antioxidant content, whereas krill oil is rich in antioxidants. Krill oil contains astaxanthin—probably the most potent antioxidant in nature—which is why it is so stable and resistant to oxidation.

4. Many, if not most, fish and fish oil are now contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals; even fish that is thousands of miles away from coal plants and other environment-polluting industries. Antarctic krill is not prone to this contamination.

5. Krill is also far more sustainable as a food source than is fish because it’s the largest biomass in the world, making krill harvesting one of the most sustainable practices on the planet.

Could Omega-3 Deficiency be Killing More People than Breast Cancer?
Three studies in 2009 showed that omega-3 fat deficiency might cause or contribute to up to 96,000 premature deaths each year. Compare that number to the estimated 40,000 women who die from breast cancer in the U.S. annually3, and the implications of omega-3 deficiency become quite clear.
Omega-3 fats from krill have been shown to be far more effective than fish oil in reducing fat levels in your heart and liver. The latest study adds to the mountain of research that krill oil can lower your risk for metabolic syndrome, obesity, type-2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
In one study, krill oil was found to reduce fat levels in the hearts of rats by 42 percent, compared to just two percent for fish oil. Similarly, krill was found to reduce fat in the liver by 60 percent, compared to 38 percent for fish oil. The buildup of fat in your liver can lead to insulin sensitivity, metabolic syndrome and eventually full-blown type 2 diabetes, just as the buildup of fat in your heart can predispose you to a heart attack.

Krill Oil Can Also Help Protect Your Brain
Some omega-3 fats—especially DHA—are critical for your nervous system, particularly your brain. DHA is converted into substances called neuroprotectins. Alzheimer’s disease is associated with a shortage of these neuroprotectins. Fats make up about two-thirds of your brain tissue. Myelin, the protective sheath that covers your neurons, is composed of 30 percent protein and 70 percent fat. These fats are not just important for adults. Omega-3s are crucial for proper brain and eye development in infants and children.
Two different studies have shown that taking 800 to 900 mg of DHA per day for 16 to 24 weeks resulted in significant improvements in memory, verbal fluency scores, and rate of learning.
Low concentrations of EPA and DHA are known to accelerate cognitive decline and increase your risk for mood swings and mood disorders. Those suffering from depression have been found to have lower levels of omega-3 in their blood, compared to nondepressed individuals. A 2010 study involving 46 depressed elderly women4 concluded that omega-3 supplementation can improve quality of life and effectively treat depression.
According to a report published in 2007 in the Alternative Medicine Review5, DHA and EPA in krill oil can lessen a variety of brain and mental disorders, including autism and dyslexia. DHA also protects your cells from gene mutations that can lead to brain diseases such as Parkinson’s and some forms of Alzheimer’s disease, by preventing “misfolding” of certain proteins that occur as a result of those mutations.

Krill Oil is a Potent Anti-Inflammatory
A major reason krill oil has such impressive benefits is that it powerfully reduces inflammation in your body. They produce compounds called resolvins and protectins, which help quell inflammation before it can do too much damage to your tissues. Several studies have been published on the remarkable effectiveness of krill oil in combating inflammation-related disorders, such as arthritis.
One 2011 study in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that women with the highest omega-3 levels had a 44 percent reduced risk of dying from inflammatory diseases. Studies have proven krill oil’s ability to reduce pain, stiffness, and functional impairment in people with inflammatory disorders in just one to two weeks6 and reduce the symptoms for both rheumatoid and osteoarthritis sufferers7, 8.

The Verdict is in: Krill Oil May Help with Literally DOZENS of Diseases
GreenMedInfo.com now lists more than than 25 different diseases krill may help prevent or reverse. Of course, if you extend the search to include everything related to omega-3 fats, the list of benefits expands even more, since the gifts of krill oil include everything known to be good about omega-3s. The implications are truly profound, and I’m sure you’ll be seeing much more krill research in the future. The following table includes links to a number of studiesspecific to krill oil, by disease. There is much more information about krill and omega-3 fats on the GreenMedInfo website.

✓ Cardiovascular disease, hyperlipidemia
✓ Inflammation, and C-Reactive Protein
✓ Oxidative stress

✓ Arthritis: Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid arthritis (RA)
✓ Metabolic syndrome, including obesity and fatty liver
✓ Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and dysmenorrhea

✓ Brain disease: Cognitive dysfunction, memory loss, brain aging, learning disorders and ADHD
✓ Cancer
✓ Kidney disease

A Final Note on Krill Oil Supplements
Please remember that I don’t advocate taking large amounts of supplements. It is far better to receive you nutrients from food. If it weren’t for the polluted waterways of the world, I would recommend getting your omega-3 fats from fish rather than supplements, but unfortunately, most fish are now so contaminated with mercury and other toxins, I just cannot recommend it any longer.
As you can see from the research above, animal-based omega-3 fats are essential for optimal health. I recommend you consider taking a high quality omega-3 supplement, and I think krill oil is your best option.
The only kind of krill oil I recommend is from genuine Antarctic krill. Look for a brand that is cold-processed, which preserves its biological benefits. Please make sure that hexane is not used to extract the oil from the krill as some of the most popular krill oils on the market use this dangerous chemical agent. It should also be free of heavy metals, PCBs, dioxins and other contaminants. You should also make sure the krill you take is harvested in compliance with international conservation standards.

By Dr. Mercola

Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed in connection with the diabetes drug Actos, a drug that France and Germany pulled from the market a year ago after it was found to cause bladder cancer and tumors in people using it for type 2 diabetes.
At the time, the U.S. FDA responded by issuing a mere safety warning on the drug, leaving it open for continued sale and use in the United States.
Now a whistleblower has come forward with a lawsuit of her own, stating that the drug company making Actos, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, is benefiting in “tens of billions of dollars in sales” at the expense of the lives of people still taking the drug.

Actos Whistleblower Reveals Serious Fraud, Deception

Dr. Helen Ge worked for Takeda in the company’s pharmacovigilance division (this is, by the way, the same company that once received the “grand prize” for Consumers International “International Bad Products Award” – for advertising sleeping pills to children). There, Dr. Ge was in charge of reviewing side effects of Actos that were reported by patients and doctors. She then prepared safety reports that were filed with the FDA―reports that Ge says she was ordered to water-down or not report at all, so Actos would look safer than it actually was.
She believes Actos is even more dangerous than Avandia, a drug that has been removed from pharmacies because of the risk of heart attacks. Dr. Ge says that besides bladder cancer and tumors, Actos is also connected to heart attacks and stroke, suicide, schizophrenia, homicidal ideation, and renal failure. Dr. Ge filed her lawsuit in September 2011. But so far, Actos is still being sold in the U.S. She noted:1

“Takeda’s motivation to fraudulently report and under-report the serious adverse events was driven by an economic desire to falsely enhance Actos’s safety profile and to increase sales.”

Takeda Purposely Mislead the FDA, Doctors and Patients, Lawsuit Alleges

The lawsuit alleges that Takeda, like many pharmaceutical companies, was interested in protecting their profits, first and foremost. Actos is Takeda’s most profitable drug, bringing in $3.4 billion in annual sales in 2009. From 2010-2011, Actos sales made up more than half of Takeda’s total revenue!2 There was clearly significant monetary incentive there, which was spelled out in the lawsuit:

“Upon information and belief, Takeda’s motivation to fraudulently report and under-report the serious adverse events was driven by an economic desire to falsely enhance Actos’ safety profile and to increase sales.”

The suit even includes a quote from the company’s vice president of the Pharmacovigilance Department, Dr. Maria Paris, who informed employees, including Dr. Ge:

“As a company, reporting adverse events is one thing, but we must make sure that the company has to be profitable first.”

Other allegations in the lawsuit include:

Takeda caused thousands, if not millions, of false claims to be made on federal and state health care programs
Takeda was able to capture a majority of the diabetes drug market by falsely portraying Actos as safer than it actually was·
Actos is not as safe as Takeda has led the FDA, healthcare professionals and the general public to believe
Takeda failed to properly report all of the Actos related congestive heart failure (CHF) events to the FDA, and even instructed its medical reviewers not to report hundreds of non-hospitalized or non-fatal CHF cases as “serious”
Takeda improperly instructed its medical reviewers, including Dr. Ge, to change their professional opinion concerning adverse event classifications and assessments. When Dr. Ge complained of the improper reporting, her contract was terminated.
Takeda’s failure to properly and accurately report hundreds of serious CHF events caused the FDA to falsely view Actos as safer than it really was, including in studies and reports that found Actos to be safer than Avandia

A Corporate Culture of Fraud, Driven by Economic Desire

The lawsuit further alleges that Takeda has a culture of fraud that is driven, primarily, by an economic desire to increase profits:

“Upon information and belief, Relator [Dr. Ge] alleges that the corporate culture at Takeda is riddled with systemic fraud and deceit with motivation to falsely report and under report not only serious Congestive Heart Failure events, but other serious side effects experienced by people taking Actos, driven by an economic desire to falsely enhance Actos’ safety profile and to increase sales.”

Other side effects that were under-reported include:

Bladder, pancreatic and other cancers
Suicidal ideation
Renal failure
Cardiomyopathy
Rhabdomyolysis (a breakdown of muscle fiber)

Much of the underreporting appeared to occur from late 2007 to January 2010, just as the news that Avandia was dangerous broke out. By limiting their reports of adverse events, they were able to (falsely) make it appear as though Actos was “a safe alternative” to Avandia, allowing them to gain a significant portion of the diabetes drug market at the expense of patients’ lives.

Drugs Don’t Cure Diabetes

In fact, drugs can’t cure diabetes, as they do nothing to address the underlying cause. Drugs like Actos and Avandia work by making diabetes patients more sensitive to their own insulin, helping to control blood sugar levels. In fact, most conventional treatments for type 2 diabetes utilize drugs that either raise insulin or lower blood sugar. Avandia, for example, lowers your blood sugar levels by increasing the sensitivity of liver, fat and muscle cells to insulin.
But you must understand that diabetes is NOT a blood sugar disease like your doctor may have led you to believe. Type 2 diabetes is actually a disease caused by insulin resistance and faulty leptin (a relatively recently discovered hormone produced by fat) signaling, both of which are regulated through your diet.
Conventional treatment, which is focused on fixing the symptom of elevated blood sugar rather than addressing the underlying disease, is doomed to fail in most cases.
Because type 2 diabetes arises from faulty leptin signaling and insulin resistance, it is therefore a fully preventable condition that can be controlled or reversed by recovering your insulin and leptin sensitivities. However, the only known way to reestablish proper leptin and insulin signaling is through a proper diet and exercise. There is NO drug that can accomplish this – a fact that makes the current disease paradigm even more tragic, as diabetes continues to skyrocket, and the conventional treatments are needlessly killing diabetics prematurely.

One in Four Americans Impacted by Diabetes … You Don’t Have to be One of Them

Amazingly, one in four Americans has some form of diabetes or pre-diabetes.
I too have personal experience with this disease. I developed it myself at one time after following the Eat Right for Your Type diet (I don’t advise anyone to follow the blood type A recommendations), and most of my paternal relatives (my dad included), have, or have died from, diabetes. My personal experience with this condition and subsequent review of the literature made it VERY clear to me that virtually every case of type 2 diabetes is reversible … And the cure for type 2 diabetes has NOTHING to do with giving insulin or taking drugs to control your blood sugar. 
In fact, giving insulin to someone with type 2 diabetes is one of the worst things that can be done. Any physician still doing this suffers from profound ignorance of insulin physiology.
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. As mentioned earlier, to reverse the disease, you need to recover your body’s insulin and leptin sensitivities, and the ONLY way to accomplish this is through proper diet and exercise. There is NO drug that can correct leptin signaling and insulin resistance …  
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.
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.

References:

i Salient News March 12, 2012
ii Salient News March 12, 2012

By Dr. Mercola

Here are some questions posed by Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Why do we eat more than we are supposed to?
Why are we eating more?
What happened to make us eat more?

For 50,000 years or more, humans relied on a remarkable, naturally-occurring hormone called leptin to regulate what we ate, and it told our brains when we’d had enough. But somehow in recent years that regulator has become confused, and suddenly it seems like people just don’t know how to stop eating.

So why are we eating more? The answer lies in understanding the biochemistry of the brain, where the signals that tell your body you’re full are no longer working.

What Happens When Your Brain Can’t Hear Leptin’s Signals …

Leptin is a hormone produced by fat tissue, which relays important messages such as whether you should:

Be hungry, eat and make more fat
Reproduce and make babies
“Hunker down” and work overtime to maintain and repair yourself

Although most think of their brain as being “top of the food chain” in terms of making decisions to keep your body functioning, your brain actually depends on your fat to “speak” to it and tell it how much energy your body has available, and then what to do with it.

Growing evidence shows that leptin may influence areas of your brain that control the intensity of your desire to eat. It has also been found that leptin not only changes brain chemistry, but can also “rewire” the very important areas of your brain that control hunger and metabolism. The way your body stores fat is a carefully regulated process that is controlled, primarily, by leptin. If you gain excess weight, the additional fat produces extra leptin that should alert your brain that your body should stop creating and storing more fat and start burning the accumulated excess.

To do this, signals are sent to your brain to stop being hungry and to stop eating. It is very important that your brain is able to accurately “hear” the messages leptin sends it, as otherwise your brain thinks you’re depleted and will continue to feel hungry, even starving. If your brain does not respond appropriately to leptin, you will likely continue to eat and store more fat.

So why then, if your body has an innate system, honed by eons of trial and error to regulate your fat stores to perfection, is the United States and many other countries facing an obesity epidemic of unprecedented scale?

Because many people have become “leptin resistant.”

Leptin resistance occurs when your body is unable to properly hear leptin’s signals. How does this happen? By overexposure to high levels of the hormone, caused by eating too much sugar.

You may be familiar with this process occurring with the hormone insulin. High blood sugar levels cause repeated surges in insulin and this causes your cells to become “insulin-resistant,” which leads to the production of even higher levels of insulin, eventually leading to type 2 diabetes. It is much the same as being in a room with a strong odor for a period of time. Eventually, you stop being able to smell it, because the signal no longer gets through.

The same process also occurs with leptin. It has been shown that as sugar gets metabolized and stored as triglycerides in fat cells, the fat cells release surges of leptin and those surges result in leptin-resistance, just as it results in insulin-resistance. When you become leptin-resistant, your body can no longer hear the messages telling it to stop eating and burn fat — so it remains hungry and stores more fat.
This will not only contribute to weight gain, but also increase your risk of many chronic illnesses, as leptin plays a significant, if not primary, role in heart disease, obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, reproductive disorders, and perhaps the rate of aging itself.

Too Much Sugar Overstimulates Your Brain’s Pleasure Center, Leading to Addiction

When you eat sugar it triggers the production of your brain’s natural opioids — a key initiator of the addiction process. Your brain essentially becomes addicted to stimulating the release of its own opioids. The intensity of this effect is experienced on the same level as morphine or heroin.

Researchers have speculated that the sweet receptors (two protein receptors located on your tongue), which evolved in ancestral times when the diet was very low in sugar, have not adapted to the seemingly unlimited access to a cheap and omnipresent sugar supply in the modern diet. Therefore, the abnormally high stimulation of these receptors by our sugar-rich diets generates excessive reward signals in your brain, which have the potential to override normal self-control mechanisms, create tolerance and withdrawal symptoms, thus leading to addiction.

According to Dr. Lustig, it is virtually impossible to exert enough cognitive willpower to overcome this 24/7 biochemical drive! He states in The Atlantic:i

“The brain’s pleasure center, called the nucleus accumbens, is essential for our survival as a species… Turn off pleasure, and you turn off the will to live… But long-term stimulation of the pleasure center drives the process of addiction… When you consume any substance of abuse, including sugar, the nucleus accumbens receives a dopamine signal, from which you experience pleasure. And so you consume more. The problem is that with prolonged exposure, the signal attenuates, gets weaker. So you have to consume more to get the same effect — tolerance.

And if you pull back on the substance, you go into withdrawal. Tolerance and withdrawal constitute addiction. And make no mistake, sugar is addictive.”

Tolerance and withdrawal are the hallmarks of addiction – they occur with alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, morphine, cannabis and every drug of abuse … and also with sugar. Like many types of addictions, sugar addiction can in fact be deadly. Evidence is mounting that sugar is a primary contributing factor in obesity and diabetes, but other chronic and lethal diseases.
There’s really no doubt anymore that sugar is indeed toxic to your body, and it’s only a matter of time before it will be commonly accepted as a causative factor in most cancer, in the same way that now we accept without question that smoking and alcohol abuse are direct causes of lung cancer and cirrhosis of the liver, respectively.

The Average American Consumes 12 Teaspoons of Sugar a Day

… This amounts to about two TONS of sugar during a lifetime. While it may offer a fleeting feeling of pleasure when it passes through your lips, the more you eat the more you’ll crave – and ultimately the more you’ll need to eat to get those same pleasurable feelings. This sugar addiction can actually re-wire your brain, not to mention make you very sick …

Of all the molecules capable of inflicting damage in your body, sugar molecules are probably the most damaging.

Fructose, in particular, is an extremely potent pro-inflammatory agent that creates harmful advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and speeds up the aging process. It also promotes the kind of dangerous growth of fat cells around your vital organs (visceral fat) that are the hallmark of diabetes and heart disease. As mentioned, sugar/fructose also increases your insulin and leptin levels and decrease the receptor sensitivity for both of these vital hormones, and these hormonal abnormalities are a major factor in premature aging and age-related chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease.

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 — which is exactly what will happen if you’re eating like the typical American, who consumes on average a staggering 2.5 pounds of sugar a week!
And when you add in other low-quality carbohydrate-rich foods such as white bread, sugar, pasta, pastries, cookies, and candy, which also break down to sugar (starch is broken down into glucose) in your body and often contain added sugar as well, it’s not so difficult to see why so many Americans are in such poor health.

Can You Stop Eating So Much Sugar?

While Dr. Lustig believes the biochemical drive to consume sugar and overeat is virtually unstoppable, limiting or eliminating your sugar intake is the most effective way to break free from this disease-causing cycle. If you still want to use a sweetener occasionally, the sweet herb stevia makes a good, non-addictive sugar substitute. (It is important to avoid ALL artificial sweeteners, which can damage your health even more quickly than sugar.)

If you currently eat sugar, there’s a good chance you’re struggling with sugar addiction.

So I highly recommend trying an energy psychology technique called Turbo Tapping, which has helped many “soda addicts” kick their sweet habit, and it should work for any type of sweet craving you may have. Remember that in order to minimize your sugar intake, you need to avoid most processed foods, as most contain added sugar. Even savory foods like salad dressing, soup, and bread often contain sugar. For optimal health, eat natural whole foods primarily, and limit your fructose consumption to below 25 grams per day, including that from fresh fruit.

A couple of other tricks to try to kick your sugar cravings:

Exercise: Anyone who exercises intensely on a regular basis will know that significant amounts of cardiovascular exercise is one of the best “cures” for food cravings. It always amazes me how my appetite, especially for sweets, dramatically decreases after a good workout. I believe the mechanism is related to the dramatic reduction in insulin levels that occurs after exercise.

Organic, black coffee: Coffee is a potent opioid receptor antagonist, and contains compounds such as cafestrol — found plentifully in both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee — which can bind to your opioid receptors, occupy them and essentially block your addiction to other opioid-releasing foods.ii,iii This may profoundly reduce the addictive power of other substances, such as sugar.

References:

i The Atlantic February 21, 2012
ii Clin Exp Pharmacol Physiol. 2012 Feb 14.
iii Nature. 1983 Jan 20;301(5897):246-8.

By Dr. Mercola

Your diet certainly has an impact on your appearance; your weight, complexion, muscle mass, nail strength, hair luster, and even your susceptibility to wrinkles and other signs of premature aging are all influenced by the foods you eat.
So your food choices can certainly lead to a sexier you.
But now researchers have revealed that beneficial bacteria known as probiotics may impart even more sexiness to those who consume them — eating probiotic-rich yogurt, in fact, gave mice far more than shiny fur … it gave them “swagger.”

Can Eating Probiotics Give You “Swagger”?

Writing in the journal Scientific American, researchers noted that mice fed probiotic-rich yogurt had a certain “swagger,” which was caused by the males projecting their testes outward. This was done, the article notes, because the testicles of the yogurt-consuming mice were 5 percent heavier than those of mice fed typical diets, and 15 percent heavier than those of mice fed a junk-food diet.i
This wasn’t only an aesthetic effect, as the yogurt-eating males also inseminated their partners faster and had more offspring. The female yogurt-eating mice also experienced a benefit; they gave birth to larger litters and were more likely to raise their pups successfully. The probiotic-rich diet also impacted the mice fur, leaving it shinier and silkier, with 10 times the active follicle density compared to the other mice. The researchers noted:

” … the probiotic microbes in the yogurt help to make the animals leaner and healthier, which indirectly improves sexual machismo.”

Harvard researchers are currently investigating the impact of yogurt consumption on semen quality in men, and so far say their results are consistent with those of the mice.

Your Gut Bacteria Impact Your Weight, Too

There’s obviously much more to being sexy than the number on the scale, but weight loss is often one of the first steps that comes to mind when most people think about being “sexier.”
Restoring your gut flora should be an important consideration if you’re struggling to lose weight, as the make-up of gut bacteria tends to differ in lean versus obese people. This is one of the most compelling areas of probiotic research to date, and you can read about a handful of such studies here.
For instance, obese individuals may have about 20 percent more of a family of bacteria known as Firmicutes, and almost 90 percent less of a bacteria called Bacteroidetes than lean people. Firmicutes help your body to extract calories from complex sugars and deposit those calories in fat.
When these microbes were transplanted into normal-weight mice, those mice started to accumulate twice as much fat.ii So this is one explanation for how the microflora in your gut may play a key role in weight management.
Yet another study showed that obese people were able to reduce their abdominal fat by nearly 5 percent, and their subcutaneous fat by over 3 percent, just by drinking a probiotic-rich fermented milk beverage for 12 weeks.iii Given that the control group experienced no significant fat reductions at all during the study period, this is one more gold star for probiotics.

Why It’s Imperative for Women of Reproductive Age to Consume Probiotics

You may find motivation to nourish your gut flora with a probiotic-rich diet because it may help you lose weight and make you appear sexier … but also important is the impact it can have on your future children.
Many women of reproductive age are deficient in beneficial bacteria—a deficiency that transfers to their babies and may set the stage for any number of problems! To get a solid understanding of just HOW important this is, I highly recommend reviewing the information shared by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride in the interview below.
She presents a fascinating and elegant description of the foundational conditions that contribute to such disorders as ADHD, learning disabilities and autism, along with a pragmatic approach to help circumvent and stem the autism epidemic—and it all begins with the mother’s gut flora.
Dr. Campbell explains:

“The baby acquires its gut flora at the time of birth, when the baby goes through the birth canal of the mother. So whatever lives in mom’s birth canal, in mom’s vagina, becomes the baby’s gut flora.  So what lives in mom’s vagina? It’s a very richly populated area of a woman’s body. The vaginal flora comes from the bowel. So if the mother has abnormal gut flora, she will have abnormal flora in her birth canal.”

Download Interview Transcript
Establishment of normal gut flora in the first 20 days or so of life plays a crucial role in appropriate maturation of your baby’s immune system. Hence, babies who develop abnormal gut flora are left with compromised immune systems. And that’s where vaccines have the potential to wreak havoc. Vaccinations were originally developed for children with perfectly healthy immune systems, but according to Dr. Campbell-McBride, children with unbalanced gut flora are not fit to be vaccinated according to the standard vaccination protocol.

Is Yogurt a Good Source of Probiotics?

When most people think of increasing probiotics in their diet, they automatically think of yogurt, and specifically the heavily advertised brands that have recently come on the market with claims of bettering your digestive health. However, most commercial yogurts are not worse than worthless as they’re pasteurized, they will be associated with all of the problems of pasteurized milk products and they typically contain added sugars, high fructose corn syrup, artificial coloring, or artificial sweeteners, all of which will only worsen your health.
I plan on doing a full-blown report on this later this year with Cornucopia that will go into far more specific details. That said, yogurt made from organic raw milk is an outstanding source of probiotics, as are other naturally fermented foods, such as:

Lassi (an Indian yoghurt drink, traditionally enjoyed before dinner)
Fermented milk, such as kefir (a quart of unpasteurized kefir has far more active bacteria than you can possibly purchase in any probiotics supplement, and it’s simple to make at home)
Various pickled fermentations of cabbage, turnips, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, squash and carrots
Natto (fermented soy)

Eating fermented foods like these regularly will help to “reseed” your body’s beneficial bacteria, which is under constant assault from antibiotics, chlorinated water, antibacterial soap, the metabolic byproducts of stress, and poor diet, especially sugar consumption. Eating sugar actually nourishes the bad or pathogenic bacteria yeast and fungi in your gut. So tending to the bacteria in your gut is an ongoing process, much like tending to a flower garden.
If you do not consume traditionally fermented foods on a regular basis, a high-quality probiotic supplement is one of the few I do recommend – but one of the major results of eating a healthy diet like the one described in my nutrition plan is that you stimulate your beneficial gut bacteria to flourish naturally, and they secondarily perform the real “magic” of restoring your health and also, perhaps, your “sexiness.”

References:

i Scientific American (May 2012), 306, 26
ii Nature 444, 1027-1031 (21 December 2006)
iii Eur J Clin Nutr. 2010 Jun;64(6):636-43. Epub 2010 Mar 10.

By Dr. Mercola

Looking for ways to boost your intellect, stave off mental aging, and maybe even live a longer life? You might be surprised to learn that not only do such strategies exist, but many are easily attainable by making simple tweaks here and there to your daily routine. Embracing the strategies that follow may give a hearty boost to your brainpower, help you keep mentally healthy and ultimately even make yourself smarter.

Nine Tips for a Smarter You …

1. Exercise
Exercise encourages your brain to work at optimum capacity by causing nerve cells to multiply, strengthening their interconnections and protecting them from damage. During exercise nerve cells release proteins known as neurotrophic factors. One in particular, called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), triggers numerous other chemicals that promote neural health, and directly benefits cognitive functions, including learning. Further, exercise provides protective effects to your brain through:

The production of nerve-protecting compounds
Greater blood flow to your brain
Improved development and survival of neurons
Decreased risk of cardiovascular diseases such as stroke

A 2010 study on primates published in Neurosciencei also revealed that regular exercise not only improved blood flow to the brain, but also helped the monkeys learn new tasks twice as quickly as non-exercising monkeys, a benefit the researchers believe would hold true for people as well.
Still more research has shown that exercise boosts mitochondria, organelles that produce energy within every cell of your body, which suggests exercise may help your brain work faster and more efficiently.ii
To get the most out of your workouts, I recommend a comprehensive program that includes Peak Fitness high-intensity exercise, strength training, stretching, and core work.
2. Animal-Based Omega-3 Fats
Docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, an omega-3 fat, is an essential structural component of both your brain and retina. Approximately 60 percent of your brain is composed of fats—25 percent of which is DHA. DHA is also an essential structural ingredient of breast milk, which is believed to be a major reason why breastfed babies consistently score higher on IQ tests than formula-fed babies.
Omega-3 fats such as DHA are considered essential because your body cannot produce it, and must get it from your daily diet. DHA-rich foods include fish, liver, and brain—all of which are no longer consumed in great amounts by most Americans.
DHA is found in high levels in your neurons — the cells of your central nervous system, where it provides structural support. When your omega-3 intake is inadequate, your nerve cells become stiff and more prone to inflammation as the missing omega-3 fats are substituted with cholesterol and omega-6 instead. Once your nerve cells become rigid and inflamed, proper neurotransmission from cell to cell and within cells become compromised.
The influence of omega-3 fat on physical and mental health has been the subject of intense research over the last four decades, and there’s compelling evidence that animal-based omega-3 fats can help reduce the symptoms of a variety of psychiatric illnesses and degenerative brain disorders. For example, low DHA levels have been linked to memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.
Even more exciting is research showing that degenerative conditions can not only be prevented but also potentially reversed. For example, in one study, 485 elderly volunteers suffering from memory deficits saw significant improvement after taking 900 mg of DHA per day for 24 weeks, compared with controls.iii
Another study found significant improvement in verbal fluency scores after taking 800 mg of DHA per day for four months compared with placebo.iv Furthermore, memory and rate of learning were significantly improved when DHA was combined with 12 mg of lutein per day.
Interestingly, research suggests that the unsaturated fatty acid composition of normal brain tissue is age-specific, which could imply that the older you get, the greater your need for animal-based omega-3 fat to prevent mental decline and brain degeneration.
To compensate for our inherently low omega-3 diet, a high quality animal-based omega-3 supplement is something that I recommend for virtually everyone, especially if you’re pregnant. I prefer krill oil compared to all other animal-based omega-3’s, because while the metabolic effects of krill oil and fish oil are “essentially similar,” krill oil is as effective as fish oil despite the fact that it contains less EPA and DHA.v This is because krill oil is absorbed up to 10-15 times as well as fish oil, due to its molecular composition, and is less prone to oxidation (rancidity) because it is naturally complexed with the potent fat-soluble antioxidant astaxanthin.
3. Sleep
Sleep is not only essential for regenerating your physical body, but it is imperative for reaching new mental insights and being able to see new creative solutions to old problems. Sleep removes the blinders and helps “reset” your brain to look at problems from a different perspective, which is crucial to creativity.
Research from Harvard indicates that people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas after sleeping, but few realize that their performance has actually improved. Sleep is also known to enhance your memories and help you “practice” and improve your performance of challenging skills. In fact, a single night of sleeping only four to six hours can impact your ability to think clearly the next day.
The process of growth, known as plasticity, is believed to underlie the brain’s capacity to control behavior, including learning and memory. Plasticity occurs when neurons are stimulated by events, or information, from the environment. However, sleep and sleep loss modify the expression of several genes and gene products that may be important for synaptic plasticity. Furthermore, certain forms of long-term potentiation, a neural process associated with the laying down of learning and memory, can be elicited in sleep, suggesting synaptic connections are strengthened while you slumber.
As you might suspect, this holds true for infants too, and research shows that naps can give a boost to babies’ brainpower. Specifically, infants who slept in between learning and testing sessions had a better ability to recognize patterns in new information, which signals an important change in memory that plays an essential role in cognitive development.vi Even among adults, a mid-day nap was found to dramatically boost and restore brainpower.vii You can find 33 tips to help you get the shut-eye you need here.
4. Coconut Oil
One of the primary fuels your brain needs is glucose, which is converted into energy. Your brain actually manufactures its own insulin to convert glucose in your bloodstream into the food it needs to survive.
If your brain’s production of insulin decreases, your brain literally begins to starve, as it’s deprived of the glucose-converted energy it needs to function normally. This is what happens to Alzheimer’s patients — portions of their brain start to atrophy, or starve, leading to impaired functioning and eventual loss of memory, speech, movement and personality.
In effect, your brain can begin to atrophy from starvation if it becomes insulin resistant and loses its ability to convert glucose into energy. Fortunately, your brain is able to run on more than one type of energy supply, and this is where coconut oil enters the picture.
There’s another substance that can feed your brain and prevent brain atrophy. It may even restore and renew neuron and nerve function in your brain after damage has set in.
The substance in question is called ketone bodies or ketoacids. Ketones are what your body produces when it converts fat (as opposed to glucose) into energy, and a primary source of ketone bodies are the medium chain triglycerides (MCT) found in coconut oil! Coconut oil contains about 66 percent MCTs. Therapeutic levels of MCTs have been studied at 20 grams per day. According to research by Dr. Mary Newport, just over two tablespoons of coconut oil (about 35 ml or 7 level teaspoons) would supply you with the equivalent of 20 grams of MCT, which is indicated as either a preventative measure against degenerative neurological diseases, or as a treatment for an already established case.
Everyone tolerates coconut oil differently, so you may have to start slowly and build up to these therapeutic levels. My recommendation is to start with one teaspoon, taken with food in the mornings. Gradually add more coconut oil every few days until you are able to tolerate four tablespoons. Coconut oil is best taken with food, to avoid upsetting your stomach.
5. Vitamin D
Activated vitamin D receptors increase nerve growth in your brain, and researchers have also located metabolic pathways for vitamin D in the hippocampus and cerebellum of the brain, areas that are involved in planning, processing of information, and the formation of new memories.
The National Institutes of Mental Health recently concluded that it is vital that the mother get enough vitamin D while pregnant in order for the baby’s brain to develop properly. The child must also get enough vitamin D after birth for “normal” brain functioning. In older adults, too, research has shown that low vitamin D levels are associated with poorer brain function, and increasing levels may help keep older adults mentally fit.viii
Appropriate sun exposure would take care of these issues, as the sun is irreplaceable when it comes to the body’s ability to produce adequate amounts of vitamin D.
Appropriate sun exposure is all it takes to keep your levels where they need to be for healthy brain function. If this is not an option, a safe tanning bed is the next best alternative, followed by a vitamin D3 supplement. It now appears as though most adults need about 8,000 IU’s of vitamin D a day in order to get their serum levels above 40 ng/ml, which is the lowest they should be. Ideally, your serum levels should be between 50-70 ng/ml, and up to 100 ng/ml to treat cancer and heart disease. However, it’s important to realize that there’s no magic dosage when it comes to vitamin D. What’s important is your serum level, so you need to get your vitamin D levels tested to make sure you’re staying within the optimal and therapeutic ranges as indicated below.

6. Optimize Your Gut Flora
Your gut is your “second brain,” and your gut bacteria transmits information to your brain via the vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve that runs from your brain stem into your enteric nervous system (the nervous system of your gastrointestinal tract). There is a close connection between abnormal gut flora and abnormal brain development, and just as you have neurons in your brain, you also have neurons in your gut — including neurons that produce neurotransmitters like serotonin, which is also found in your brain and is linked to mood.
Quite simply, your gut health can impact your brain function, psyche, and behavior, as they are interconnected and interdependent in a number of different ways.
Your gut bacteria are an active and integrated part of your body, and as such are heavily dependent on your diet and vulnerable to your lifestyle. If you consume a lot of processed foods and sweetened drinks, for instance, your gut bacteria are likely going to be severely compromised because processed foods in general will destroy healthy microflora and sugars of all kinds feed bad bacteria and yeast. Limiting sugar and processed foods, while eating traditionally fermented foods (rich in naturally occurring good bacteria), taking a probiotic supplement and breastfeeding your baby are among the best ways to optimize gut flora and subsequently support brain health.

Download Interview Transcript
7. Vitamin B12
Vitamin B12, or rather a lack thereof, has been called the “canary in the coalmine” for your future brain health, and recent research has bolstered the importance of this vitamin in keeping your mind sharp as you age. According to the latest research, people with high levels of markers for vitamin B12 deficiency were more likely to score lower on cognitive tests, as well as have a smaller total brain volume,ix which suggests a lack of the vitamin may contribute to brain shrinkage.
Mental fogginess and problems with memory are two of the top warning signs that you have vitamin B12 deficiency, and this is indicative of its importance for your brain health.
In addition, a Finnish study found that people who consume foods rich in B12 may reduce their risk of Alzheimer’s in their later years.x For each unit increase in the marker of vitamin B12 (holotranscobalamin) the risk of developing Alzheimer’s was reduced by 2 percent. Research also shows that supplementing with B vitamins, including B12, helps to slow brain atrophy in elderly people with mild cognitive impairment (brain atrophy is a well-established characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease).xi
Vitamin B12 deficiency is widespread and many have trouble absorbing this nutrient properly from food sources. Blood tests for vitamin B12 are not always a reliable indicator of B12 status, so watching for symptoms of deficiency and increasing your dietary and supplemental intake is a practical alternative to blood testing.
B12 is available in its natural form only in animal food sources. These include seafood, beef, chicken, pork, milk, and eggs. If you don’t consume enough of these animal products (and I don’t recommend consuming seafood unless you know it is from a pure water source) to get an adequate supply of B12, or if your body’s ability to absorb the vitamin from food is compromised, vitamin B12 supplementation is completely non-toxic and inexpensive, especially when compared to the cost of laboratory testing. I recommend an under-the-tongue fine mist spray, as this technology helps you absorb the vitamin into the fine capillaries under your tongue.
8. Listen to Music
It’s long been theorized that listening to music may boost your brainpower; you’ve probably heard of this with the “Mozart Effect,” which suggests listening to classical music can make you smarter. Indeed, research has shown that listening to music while exercising boosted cognitive levels and verbal fluency skills in people diagnosed with coronary artery disease (coronary artery disease has been linked to a decline in cognitive abilities). In this study, signs of improvement in the verbal fluency areas more than doubled after listening to music compared to that of the non-music session.xii
Listening to music has also been associated with enhanced cognitive functioning and improved mental focus among healthy adults, so take advantage of this simple pleasure whenever you can.
9. Challenge Your Mind
One of the simplest methods to boost your brain function is to keep on learning. The size and structure of neurons and the connections between them actually change as you learn. This can take on many forms above and beyond book learning to include activities like traveling, learning to play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language, or participating in social and community activities.
Another important method? Brain aerobics. As with learning, challenging your brain with mind-training exercises can keep your brain fit as you age. This can be something as simple as thinking of famous people whose first names begin with the letter A, doing crossword puzzles or playing board games that get you thinking. Research has even shown that surfing the Web activates regions in your brain related to decision-making and complex reasoning.xiii So unlike passively watching TV, using the Internet is an engaging task that may actually help to improve your brainpower.

By Dr. Mercola

You may be aware that vitamin D and calcium are a powerful duo for bone health, including the prevention of osteoporosis. One of the undisputed benefits of vitamin D is that it helps you ABSORB calcium – this link has been known for many decades.
But there is also evidence that vitamin K, and specifically vitamin K2, is another key player in your bone health, and may be just as crucial in helping you prevent bone fractures as you age.

A Powerful Nutrient Trio to Reduce Your Osteoporosis Risk

A study published in Osteoporosis International has concluded that lifetime supplementation with vitamin K1 or, even better, K2, vitamin D3, and calcium is likely to reduce fractures and increase survival in postmenopausal women. Bone loss speeds up most dramatically during the first 10 years after menopause, which is the period when osteoporosis is most likely to develop.
Many are under the mistaken impression that a prescription drug combined with calcium supplements is the answer to strong healthy bones, but the regular consumption of a healthy diet, along with safe sun exposure and extra supplementation when appropriate, is likely to be far superior.
Theorizing that vitamin K might have a role in the primary prevention of fractures, researchers studied the cost-effectiveness of various interventions for preventing fractures in 50-year-old postmenopausal women. They learned that the vitamin K1, vitamin D3, and calcium combination could reduce the lifetime probability of at least one fracture by 20 percent, but adding vitamin K2 to vitamin D3 reduced it by 25 percent.

Vitamin K1 and K2: Which is Better for Your Bones?

In case you weren’t aware, vitamin K comes in two forms, and it is important to understand the differences between them before devising your nutritional plan of attack.

Vitamin K1: Found in green vegetables, K1 goes directly to your liver and helps you maintain a healthy blood clotting system. (This is the kind of K that infants need to help prevent a serious bleeding disorder.)
Vitamin K2: Bacteria produce this type of vitamin K. It is present in high quantities in your gut, but unfortunately is not absorbed from there and passes out in your stool. K2 goes straight to vessel walls, bones, and tissues other than your liver.

There are several different forms of vitamin K2: MK4, MK7, MK8, and MK9. The form of vitamin K that has the most relevance for health benefits is MK7, a newer and longer acting form with more practical applications. MK7 is extracted from the Japanese fermented soy product called natto. You could actually get plenty of MK7 from consuming natto, as it is relatively inexpensive and available in most Asian food markets.
Few people, however, easily tolerate its smell and slimy texture, so oftentimes people who find natto unpalatable prefer to take a supplement. Most vitamin K2 supplements are in the form MK7. You can also get MK7 by eating fermented cheeses. There has been some remarkable research about the protective effects of vitamin K2 against osteoporosis:

A number of Japanese trials have shown that vitamin K2 completely reverses bone loss and in some cases even increases bone mass in people with osteoporosis.i
The pooled evidence of seven Japanese trials show that vitamin K2 supplementation produces a 60 percent reduction in vertebral fractures and an 80 percent reduction in hip and other non-vertebral fractures.ii
Researchers in the Netherlands showed that vitamin K2 is three times more effective than vitamin K1 in raising osteocalcin, which controls the building of bone.iii

Why Vitamin K is So Important if You Take Calcium and Vitamin D

If you currently take calcium and vitamin D for your bones, it’s important that you also get plenty of vitamin K2. These three nutrients have a synergistic effect that cannot be achieved when one piece of the puzzle is missing. Specifically, here’s a simple explanation of why the benefits of calcium and vitamin D are largely dependent on vitamin K:

Calcium: There is new evidence that it is vitamin K (specifically, vitamin K2) that directs calcium to your skeleton, while preventing it from being deposited where you don’t want it — i.e., your organs, joint spaces, and arteries. A large part of arterial plaque consists of calcium deposits (atherosclerosis), hence the term “hardening of the arteries.”
Vitamin K2 activates a protein hormone called osteocalcin, produced by osteoblasts, which is needed to bind calcium into the matrix of your bone. Osteocalcin also appears to help prevent calcium from depositing into your arteries. So while increasing calcium is good for your bones, it is not so good for your arteries, which can become calcified. Vitamin K helps protect your blood vessels from calcifying when in the presence of high calcium levels.
Vitamin D3: As mentioned, vitamin D helps your body to absorb calcium, but vitamin K directs that calcium to your skeleton where it’s needed. You can think of vitamin D as the gatekeeper, controlling who gets in, and vitamin K as the traffic cop, directing the traffic to where it needs to go. Lots of traffic — but no traffic cop — means clogging, crowding and chaos everywhere!
In other words, without the help of vitamin K2, the calcium that your vitamin D so effectively lets in might be working AGAINST you — by building up in your coronary arteries rather than your bones. There is even evidence that the safety of vitamin D is dependent on vitamin K, and that vitamin D toxicity (although very rare with the D3 form) is actually caused by vitamin K2 deficiency.iv

How to Get These Nutrients From Natural Sources

Calcium, vitamin K2 and vitamin D3 are obviously available in supplement form, but you should know that you can also get them naturally from food and the sun.
Calcium, in particular, is better utilized by your body if it’s food-based calcium. Good sources include raw milk and cheese from pasture-raised cows (who eat plants), leafy green vegetables, the pith of citrus fruits, carob, sesame seeds and wheatgrass, to name a few. Calcium from dietary sources is typically better absorbed and utilized than calcium from supplements, which may increase your risk of heart attack or stroke.
As for vitamin D3, exposing your skin to natural sunlight is the best way to get enough of this important nutrient. Vitamin D from sunlight acts as a pro-hormone, rapidly converting in your skin into 25-hydroxyvitamin D, or vitamin D3. The next best option is using a safe tanning bed to achieve similar results as that from natural sunlight exposure, and the third best option is taking an oral vitamin D3 supplement whenever natural sun exposure is not an option, then monitoring your levels to be sure you’re within the therapeutic range.

Ideally, optimize your vitamin K2 through a combination of dietary sources (leafy green vegetables, fermented foods like natto, raw milk cheeses, etc.) and a K2 supplement, as most people don’t get sufficient amounts of vitamin K from their diet to reap its full health benefits. You must use caution with vitamin K if you take anticoagulants, but if you are generally healthy and not on these types of medications, I suggest 150-300 mcg daily.

The Vitamin That Is ‘as Good as Drugs’ at Reducing Blood Pressure

One of the best parts about optimizing your levels of vitamin D3 is that you will experience a host of beneficial “side effects” – even above and beyond your bone health.
In research presented at the European Society of Hypertension conference in London, scientists studying the effects of vitamin D3 supplementation on heart health reported that they’ve found that patients with high blood pressure can experience significant improvements in their condition by taking only the supplement, without high-power drugs. The majority of the study’s participants were deficient in vitamin D, and while scientists stopped short of recommending vitamin D be substituted for blood pressure drugs, they did say the study shows that supplementation with vitamin D was “as powerful” as the drugs.
Both vitamin D3 and vitamin K2 are important for your heart health, as they work together to increase Matrix GLA Protein (or MGP), the protein responsible for protecting your blood vessels from calcification. In healthy arteries, MGP congregates around the elastic fibers of your tunica media (arterial lining), guarding them against calcium crystal formation.

4 Steps to Help Protect Your Bones No Matter What Your Age …

One of the best ways to achieve healthy bones is a diet rich in fresh, raw whole foods that maximizes natural minerals so that your body has the raw materials it needs to do what it was designed to do. In addition, you need healthy sun exposure along with regular, weight-bearing exercise. To sum it up:

Optimize your vitamin D3 either from natural sunlight exposure, a safe tanning bed or an oral vitamin D3 supplement. Check your blood levels regularly to make sure you’re within the optimal range.
Optimize your vitamin K1 through a combination of dietary sources (leafy green vegetables, fermented foods like natto, raw milk cheeses, etc.) and a K2 supplement, if needed. Although the exact dosing (for oral supplementation) is yet to be determined, and you must use caution on the higher doses if you take anticoagulants, if you are generally healthy and not on these types of medications, I suggest 150-300 mcg daily.
Make sure you do weight-bearing exercise, which has profound benefits to your skeletal systems. My favorite is Peak Fitness but it is also very important to do strength-training exercises to produce the dynamic electric forces in your bones that will stimulate the osteoblasts to produce new bone.
Consume a wide variety of fresh, local, organic whole foods, including vegetables, nuts, seeds, organic meats and eggs, and raw organic unpasteurized dairy for calcium and other nutrients. The more of your diet you consume RAW, the better nourished you will be. Minimize sugar and refined grains.

By Dr. Mercola

In the video above, part two of the excellent series “The Skinny on Obesity,” Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, and Elissa Epel with the Center for Obesity Assessment, Study and Treatment at the University of California, continue the discussion about the impact of sugar on disease rates around the world.

If you missed part 1, you can view it here.

While total calorie consumption has contributed to increases in diabetes rates around the world, they don’t explain the whole story.  In 1985, the year I finished my residency and started in private practice, the average number of calories consumed per day for the global population was 2,655.
At the time, 0.62 percent of the global population had diabetes.

By 2010, the average daily caloric intake had risen to 2,866—an eight percent increase—but surprisingly, the diabetes rate rose by a whopping 727 percent, to 5.13 percent of the total global population.

When scientists dug deeper to determine what it is that people are eating that’s contributing most to the global crisis in obesity and obesity-related diseases, they discovered that a calorie isn’t just a calorie.

The source of the calories you consume makes all the difference in the world. They discovered that it’s the increase in total fats and carbohydrates specifically that’s causing the massive weight gain in people around the world. What’s more, there’s just ONE food on Earth that, because of its unique composition, metabolizes in your body as both fat and carbohydrate—and that product is sugar.

Sugar is Both a Fat and a Carb, and this Combo Drives World-Wide Obesity-Related Disease Rates

Sugar is the only calorie source that correlates with the increase in diabetes. In 1985, when the world-wide sugar consumption was 98 million tons, diabetes affected 30 million people. By 2010, sugar consumption had risen to 160 million tons, and global diabetes prevalence reached 346 million people. Overall, sugar is 50 times more potent than calories, in terms of causing diabetes. But why does it have this extraordinarily potent effect?

The answer lies in its unique structure. As just mentioned, it metabolizes as both fat and carbohydrate, and the reason for this is because it contains both glucose and fructose. These two sugars are not interchangeable, and your body processes each of them differently.

Sucrose (table sugar) is 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is anywhere from 42 to 55 percent fructose depending on which type is used. Glucose is the form of energy your body is designed to run on. Every cell in your body uses glucose for energy, and it’s metabolized in every organ of your body; about 20 percent of glucose is metabolized in your liver. Fructose, on the other hand, can only be metabolized by your liver, because your liver is the only organ that has the transporter for it.

Since all fructose gets shuttled to your liver, and, if you eat a typical Western-style diet, you consume high amounts of it, fructose ends up taxing and damaging your liver in the same way alcohol and other toxins do. In fact, fructose is virtually identical to alcohol with regards to the metabolic havoc it wreaks. According to Dr. Lustig, fructose is a “chronic, dose-dependent liver toxin.” And just like alcohol, fructose is metabolized directly into fat—not cellular energy, like glucose. So eating fructose is really like eating fat—it just gets stored in your fat cells, which leads to mitochondrial malfunction.

Not even fatty fruits like avocado or coconut have this effect, because your body treats them as either a fat or a carb—not both. Sugar is the only food that functions as both a fat and a carb simultaneously, and it is this combination of fat and carb that causes metabolic derangements and, subsequently, disease. So, please, don’t be fooled: when it comes to sugar, the claim you hear on TV, that “sugar is sugar” no matter what form it’s in, is a misstatement that can, quite literally, kill you—albeit slowly.

Carbohydrate Biochemistry 101

To further explain the differences between glucose and fructose, and the similarities between fructose and ethanol (alcohol), let’s review how each is metabolized in your body.

Glucose Metabolism: Glucose is a product of photosynthesis and is found in rice, corn and other grains. Once you take in glucose from a meal, 80 percent of it is used by all of the organs of your body; 20 percent goes to your liver to be metabolized and stored. The following is what happens to that 20 percent, once it reaches your liver (this is normal, and how your body was designed to operate):

Whatever glucose your body doesn’t need immediately gets converted into glycogen for storage in your liver. Glycogen can be easily converted to energy when you need it. Your liver has no limit to how much glycogen it can store without detrimental effects.
A small amount of pyruvate is produced, which ends up being converted to ATP (the chemical storage form of energy) and carbon dioxide.
Insulin is released by your pancreas in response to the rise in blood glucose (i.e., blood sugar), which helps the glucose get into your cells. Without insulin, your cells would not be able to process the glucose and therefore would have no energy for movement, growth, repair, or other functions. Insulin is key to unlocking the door of the cell to allow the glucose to be transferred from the bloodstream into the cell.
When you consume 120 calories of glucose, less than ONE calorie contributes to adverse metabolic outcomes.

Fructose Metabolism: 100 percent of the fructose you consume goes directly to your liver. Fructose metabolism creates a number of adverse effects, including:

Fructose is immediately converted to fructose-1-phosphate (F1P), depleting your liver cells of phosphates. This process produces waste products in the form of uric acid. Uric acid blocks an enzyme that makes nitric oxide, which is your body’s natural blood pressure regulator. Hence your blood pressure rises, leading to hypertension. Elevated uric acid levels can also cause gout.
Almost all of the F1P is turned into pyruvate, ending up as citrate, which results in de novo lipogenesis, the end products of which are free fatty acids (FFAs), very low-density lipoproteins (VLDLs are smaller, denser LDLs that get stuck beneath your epithelial cells and stimulate plaque formation), and triglycerides. The end result is hyperlipidemia.
Fructose stimulates g-3-p (activated glycerol), which is the crucial molecule for creating triglycerides within fat cells. The more g-3-p that is available, the more fat is deposited.
FFAs are exported from your liver and taken up in skeletal muscle, causing skeletal muscle insulin resistance. Some of the FFAs also stay in your liver, leading to fat accumulation, hepatic insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)
Insulin resistance stresses your pancreas, which pumps out more insulin in response to rising blood sugar as your cells are unable to get the sugar out of your bloodstream, and this can progress to type 2 diabetes.
When you consume 120 calories of fructose, about 40 calories contribute to adverse metabolic outcomes.

Ethanol Metabolism: After consuming an alcoholic beverage, 10 percent of the ethanol gets broken down by your stomach and intestine as a “first pass” effect, and another 10 percent is metabolized by your brain and other organs. The fact that ethanol is partially metabolized in your brain is the reason you experience that familiar “buzz.” The remaining 80 percent is broken down by your liver, causing the following metabolic cascade:

Your liver converts ethanol to aldehydes, which produce free radicals that damage proteins in your liver. Excess citrate is formed in the process, stimulating the production of FFAs, VLDL and triglycerides.
The resulting lipids, together with the ethanol, create a cascade of inflammation, causing hepatic insulin resistance, liver inflammation and cirrhosis. Fat accumulation in your liver can also lead to fatty liver disease.
FFAs cause your skeletal muscles to become insulin resistant. This is a worse form of insulin resistance than hepatic insulin resistance and can lead to type 2 diabetes.
When you consume 120 calories of ethanol, about 40 calories contribute to adverse metabolic outcomes—the same amount as fructose.

Liver Toxins Cause Identical Diseases

As you can see, in nearly every way, fructose is metabolized the same way as ethanol, creating the same toxic effects in your body. However, while Dr. Lustig uses the term “liver toxin” to describe fructose, he’s also careful to note that it’s not fructose per se that is toxic. There are instances when your body can use it. The problem is that people consume so MUCH of it that it turns toxic by virtue of the fact your body cannot use it. It simply gets shuttled into your cells and stored as fat. So it’s the MASSIVE DOSES you’re exposed to that make it dangerous.

When you compare the health outcomes of fructose versus alcohol consumption, you end up seeing a very familiar pattern—the diseases they cause are virtually identical! According to the chart included in the video above, these include:

Chronic Ethanol Consumption
Chronic Fructose Consumption

Hypertension
Hypertension

Cardiomyopathy
Myocardial infarction

Dyslipidemia
Dyslipidemia

Pancreatitis
Pancreatitis

Obesity
Obesity

Hepatic dysfunction (ASH)
Hepatic dysfunction (NASH)

Fetal alcohol syndrome
Fetal insulin resistance

Addiction
Habituation, if not addiction

How Much Fructose is Safe to Eat?
If you want to shed excess pounds and maintain a healthy weight long-term, and RADICALLY reduce (and in many cases virtually eliminate) your risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer, then start getting serious about restricting your consumption of fructose to no more than 25 grams per day. If you’re already overweight, or have any of these diseases or are at high risk of any of them, then you’re probably better off cutting that down to 10-15 grams per day.

I’ve also included a chart below of fructose levels in fruit to give you an idea of what 25 grams a day looks like. Just remember fruit is only one source, as fructose is a staple ingredient in the vast majority of sweetened beverages and processed foods of all kinds, from pre-packaged meals to baked goods and condiments.

In the past many have objected to my position on limiting fruit intake and I am fine with that, BUT if you are convinced, for whatever reason, that you can have unlimited fruits than I would strongly encourage you to have a blood uric acid level drawn. High uric acid is a potent marker for fructose toxicity, so if your levels are above:

4 mg/dl for men
3.5 mg/dl for women

… then you would be wise to avoid all forms of fructose until your levels have normalized—just as you would with high insulin levels. Here’s a quick reference list of some of the most common fruits that you can use to help you count your fructose grams:

Fruit
Serving Size
Grams of Fructose

Limes
1 medium
0

Lemons

1 medium

0.6

Cranberries

1 cup

0.7

Passion fruit

1 medium

0.9

Prune

1 medium

1.2

Guava

2 medium

2.2

Date (Deglet Noor style)

1 medium

2.6

Cantaloupe

1/8 of med. melon

2.8

Raspberries

1 cup

3.0

Clementine

1 medium

3.4

Kiwifruit

1 medium

3.4

Blackberries

1 cup

3.5

Star fruit

1 medium

3.6

Cherries, sweet

10

3.8

Strawberries

1 cup

3.8

Cherries, sour

1 cup

4.0

Pineapple

1 slice
(3.5″ x .75″)

4.0

Grapefruit, pink or red

1/2 medium

4.3

Fruit
Serving Size
Grams of Fructose

Boysenberries
1 cup
4.6

Tangerine/mandarin orange

1 medium

4.8

Nectarine

1 medium

5.4

Peach

1 medium

5.9

Orange (navel)

1 medium

6.1

Papaya

1/2 medium

6.3

Honeydew

1/8 of med. melon

6.7

Banana

1 medium

7.1

Blueberries

1 cup

7.4

Date (Medjool)

1 medium

7.7

Apple (composite)

1 medium

9.5

Persimmon

1 medium

10.6

Watermelon

1/16 med. melon

11.3

Pear

1 medium

11.8

Raisins

1/4 cup

12.3

Grapes, seedless (green or red)

1 cup

12.4

Mango

1/2 medium

16.2

Apricots, dried

1 cup

16.4

Figs, dried

1 cup

23.0

What Can You Use to Sweeten Your Food if You Don’t Eat Sugar? (Hint: NOT Artificial Sweeteners)

It’s important to realize that when we talk about “sugar,” ALL sugars are included. So when you’re evaluating your sugar consumption, you can’t stop counting once you’ve accounted for the number of spoons of table sugar you’ve added to foods and beverages. You must also include all other types of sweeteners, such as HFCS, honey and agave.

But please do not resort to using artificial sweeteners to sweeten your food once you limit sugar. There’s little doubt in my mind that artificial sweeteners can be even worse than sugar and fructose, and there is scientific evidence to back up that conclusion. I’ve compiled a long list of scientific studies into the health effects of aspartame, and it covers a range of concerns, from behavioral and mood changes, to brain damage, weight gain, pre-term delivery, and cancer.

Splenda is another artificial sweetener that is touting their “improved” versions as a smart and healthy way to sweeten your food, but please do not be misled. Splenda is likely to push your health in the wrong direction, and there’s nothing smart about that …

Consuming artificial sweeteners can cause distortions in your biochemistry, and if you drink diet soda in an attempt to lose weight, it won’t help you. Instead, most studies looking at this show very clearly that diet soft drinks actually increase your obesity risk by stimulating your appetite, increasing carbohydrate cravings, and stimulating fat storage!

So please, do your homework on this, and do not be swayed by sweet-talking dietitians, doctors, or any other health professional that tells you artificial sweeteners have gotten the ‘green light’ and are safe to use. There’s simply too much evidence pointing in the other direction. So, what can you use if you want an occasional sweetener? I recommend using:

The herb stevia (my favorites are the liquid forms that come in flavors like French Vanilla and English Toffee)
Dextrose (pure glucose) (glucose can be used directly by every cell in your body and as such is far safer than the metabolic poison fructose)

And remember, switching to cane sugar, honey, date sugar, coconut sugar, brown rice syrup, fruit juice, molasses, maple syrup, sucanat, sorghum, turbinado or agave syrup will NOT ameliorate any of the risks of sugar consumption, as they all contain HIGH amounts of fructose.

The Low-Fat Craze Adds to Metabolic Disease

If you’re in the habit of reading labels, you’ve no doubt realized it’s difficult to find any kind of processed, packaged food that does not contain some form of added sugar or high fructose corn syrup. And low-fat or “diet” foods tend to be the worst of the bunch. The reason for this is that when fat is removed, most of the flavor goes with it. To compensate, sugars are added.

In short, most processed, packaged foods are toxic for your metabolism and lead to mitochondrial damage and disease. Considering the fact that many eat virtually nothing BUT processed foods, it’s no wonder obesity-related diseases are peaking.

The answer, of course, is to return to a more natural diet, meaning a diet of whole, preferably organic, foods, cooked from scratch, without added sugars and other chemicals. Ideally, you would eat as much of your food raw as possible, as cooking destroys many valuable nutrients.

Like many people, I have very little “free time” in my life, but still I am committed to preparing over 95 percent of my meals in order to preserve my health. A major leap in the right direction would be to strive for a diet of 90 percent non-processed food and only 10 percent from other sources. To help you get started, I’ve created a complete nutritional program that is freely available online. It’s divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced, to help you progress at your own pace.

By Dr. Mercola

Of all the foods capable of inflicting damage in your body, sugar is one of the most damaging of all.
Sugar, and the type of sugar known as fructose, in particular, is an extremely potent pro-inflammatory agent that creates advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and speeds up the aging process.
It also promotes the kind of dangerous growth of fat cells around your vital organs which is the hallmark of diabetes and heart disease.
Sugar also increases your insulin and leptin levels and decreases receptor sensitivity for both of these vital hormones, and this is another major factor of premature aging and age-related chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease, as well as a leading cause of the climbing rates of overweight and obesity in developed countries.
That sugar is bad for your health is probably old news to you by now, but what may surprise you is just how much sugar is lurking in foods that are often passed off as “healthy.”
Many supposedly “good for you” foods have more sugar than a Twinkie!

Are You Eating These Sugar-Laden “Health” Foods?

The Huffington Post recently outed several foods that are so high in sugar, you may as well be eating a candy bar.
All of these also have more sugar than a Twinkie …

Yogurt: Most commercial yogurt is loaded with sugar – as in, over 30 grams for 6 ounces! This, along with the fact that commercial yogurt is pasteurized (and some also contains artificial colors and flavors), is why you should walk right on by the yogurt section at your supermarket. Watch out, too, for “light” yogurt brands that boast less sugar due to toxic artificial sweeteners.
On the other hand, yogurt that is made from raw organic milk, and which you eat either plain or only minimally sweetened with some berries or liquid stevia, is a true health food. This is something you can easily do at home and use the healthiest raw ingredients, including organic grass-fed raw milk as the starter.
Tomato Sauce: A cup of tomato sauce can add up to over 20 grams of sugar, and considering that most people eat that tomato sauce on top of pasta, another carb source, this could send you into sugar overload. Watch out, specifically, for brands that contain added sweeteners. Tomato sauce is a far better choice than a candy bar, but, ideally, make your own sauce at home, and serve it over shredded spaghetti squash instead of noodles.
Granola Bars: Sugar is often one of the top ingredients in granola bars, and, in fact, most are not much different than a candy bar, nutritionally speaking. Even the granola is simply another form of “hidden sugar” that most people eat far too much of. Remember, sugar and dietary carbohydrates (including grains like granola, which break down into sugar) lead to excess body fat, obesity and related health issues. No amount of exercise can compensate for this damage because if you eat a lot of sugar, it could be “reprogramming” your body to become fat.
Fat-Free Salad Dressing: When manufacturers take the fat out of a food, sugar is often added back in as a replacement. Fat-free French or Thousand Island dressings can contain over 40 grams of sugar as a result, turning a would-be healthy salad into something more resembling a dessert. Don’t be fooled by the “fat-free” label — it’s the carbs that are the culprit in weight gain and chronic disease.
Muffins: The high amount of carbs in most muffins will profoundly interfere with your leptin and insulin levels, and that is true even if it’s a “healthy” muffin, like a bran muffin. Of course, in order to make a bran muffin palatable, it probably contains quite a bit of added sugar, on top of the grains it’s made with. Many muffins are also jumbo-sized, easily packing over 30 grams of sugar, or more.
Canned Fruit: Fruit in and of itself can be problematic if eaten in excess, as it’s a source of naturally occurring fructose. But many canned fruits are also packed in sugary syrup, loaded with high fructose corn syrup. Just one cup of canned peaches or pears can contain over 30 grams of sugar. You’re far better off with a fresh piece of fruit instead, but use moderation. I recommend restricting your consumption of fructose to no more than 25 grams per day, with a maximum of 15 grams a day from fresh fruit. If you’re already overweight, or have cancer, heart disease or diabetes (or are at high risk of them), then you’re probably better off cutting that down to 10-15 grams per day — fruit included. 

Why a High-Sugar Diet Will Make You Fat

If you are seeking to lose weight and optimize your health, foods that contain added sugar, as well as grains like bread and pasta should be eliminated or else comprise very low percentages of your diet. Most people who bought into the “high-carb, low-fat” dietary recommendations has likely struggled with their weight and health, wondering what they’re doing wrong.
The problem is that overeating carbohydrates can prevent a higher percentage of fats from being used for energy, and lead to an increase in fat production and storage. Your body has a limited capacity to store excess carbohydrates. This is one of the reasons why elevated blood sugar follows their overconsumption. If you are not able to immediately use the sugar as a result of intense physical activity then one of the ways your body avoids dangerously elevated blood sugar is through converting those excess carbohydrates into excess body fat primarily in your belly.
The way it works is that any carbohydrates not immediately burned by your body as fuel are stored in the form of glycogen (a long string of glucose molecules linked together). Your body has two storage sites for glycogen: your liver and your muscles. Once the glycogen levels are filled in both your liver and muscles, excess carbohydrates are converted into fat and stored in your adipose, that is, fatty tissue.
So, although carbohydrates are “fat-free,” this is misleading because excess carbohydrates end up as excess fat. When you see refined grains on a food label, think of them as “hidden sugar,” and when you see sugar, think of it as “hidden fat.”
But that’s not the worst of it.
Any meal or snack high in “complex” carbohydrates, i.e. starch is actually a complex of glucose molecules, will also generate a rapid rise in blood glucose. To adjust for this rapid rise, your pancreas secretes insulin, which then lowers your levels of blood glucose. The problem is that insulin is essentially a storage hormone, evolved to put aside excess carbohydrate calories in the form of fat in case of future famine. So the insulin that’s stimulated by excess carbohydrates aggressively promotes the accumulation of body fat! This was enormously useful in ancient times when calories were frequently scarce, but today this setup is a disaster waiting to happen.
In other words, when you eat too much sugar, bread, pasta, and any other grain products, you’re essentially sending a hormonal message, via insulin, to your body that says “store more fat.”  This is actually a highly beneficial response in certain scenarios such as when calories are very scarce. This provides a major survival advantage — but for nearly everyone reading this, having insufficient calories is not an issue, so this protective mechanism actually sabotages your health.
If you’re having trouble getting your mind around this, a wonderful infographic created by Column Five for Massive Health, based on Why We Get Fat by science writer Gary Taubes, explains exactly why eating fat doesn’t make you fat — but eating carbs like sugar can kill you …

IMAGE COURTESY OF MASSIVE HEALTH. READ ABOUT THIS INFOGRAPHIC

Is It Possible to Cut Out Dietary Sugar and Still Feel Satisfied?

Based on USDA estimates the average American consumes 12 teaspoons of sugar a day, which equates to about TWO TONS of sugar during a lifetime. Why we eat this much sugar is not difficult to understand — it tastes good, and it gives us pleasure by triggering an innate process in your brain via dopamine and opioid signals.
What it is doing to us on both a physical and emotional level is another story entirely, and most people stand to reap major improvements in their health by cutting back on, or eliminating, sugar altogether from their diets. Many do not realize this, but frequent hunger may be a major clue that you’re not eating correctly. Your body needs fuel regularly and if you don’t provide it with the proper amounts of fats and protein and overload on sugars, you will not fill your energy reserves properly. This sets up a vicious cycle of cravings for the sugar that will solve the problem in the short run but serve to radically shorten your life in the long term.
Just remember that your body is very intelligent and only seeking to keep you alive and healthy. The cravings are its short-term solution to keep you alive and functioning. But you need to exert some higher order cognitive skills to understand how to shift out of carb burning and into a fat-burning machine. Fat is far more satiating than carbs, so if you have cut down on sugar and feel ravenous, thinking you “can’t do without the carbs,” remember this is a sign that you haven’t replaced them with sufficient amounts of fat. So go ahead and add a bit more healthy fats from the list below:

Olives and Olive oil
Coconuts and coconut oil
Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk

Raw nuts, such as, almonds or pecans
Organic pastured egg yolks
Avocados

Grass-fed meats
Palm oil
Unheated organic nut oils

 
According to experts, carbs should ideally make up 20-30 percent of your diet, while 50-70 percent of your diet should be healthy fats. While many can appear to be healthy on vastly different ratios it is best to examine the long-term consequences of veering far from these ratios when deciding if they make sense to follow for you personally.
In order to achieve this and minimize your sugar intake, you need to avoid most processed foods, as even savory foods like salad dressing, soup, and bread often contain added sugar. For optimal health, eat natural whole foods primarily, and limit your fructose consumption to below 25 grams per day. If you still want to use a sweetener occasionally, the sweet herb stevia makes a good sugar substitute. (Avoid ALL artificial sweeteners, which can damage your health even more quickly than sugar.)

Did You Know?

View the Infographic
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Find out how much sugar there is per 100 grams of certain dried fruits, spices, condiments, and other common food products through our infographic “A Sweet Trap: Shocking Amounts of Sugar in Common Foods.” Use the embed code to share it on your website.
Find out how much sugar there is per 100 grams of certain dried fruits, spices, condiments, and other common food products through our infographic “A Sweet Trap: Shocking Amounts of Sugar in Common Foods.”

Click on the code area and press CTRL + C (for Windows) / CMD + C (for Macintosh) to copy the code.
How to Kick Your Sugar Addiction to the Curb

If you’re struggling with sugar addiction and having trouble dealing with cravings, I highly recommend trying an energy psychology technique called Turbo Tapping, which has helped many “soda addicts” kick their sweet habit, and it should work for any type of sweet craving you may have. A couple of other tricks to try to kick your sugar cravings:

Exercise: Anyone who exercises intensely on a regular basis will know that significant amounts of cardiovascular exercise is one of the best “cures” for food cravings. It always amazes me how my appetite, especially for sweets, dramatically decreases after a good workout. I believe the mechanism is related to the dramatic reduction in insulin levels that occurs after exercise.
Organic, black coffee: Coffee is a potent opioid receptor antagonist, and contains compounds such as cafestrol — found plentifully in both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee — which can bind to your opioid receptors, occupy them and essentially block your addiction to other opioid-releasing foods.i ii This may profoundly reduce the addictive power of other substances, such as sugar.

References:

i Clin Exp Pharmacol Physiol. 2012 Feb 14.
ii Nature. 1983 Jan 20;301(5897):246-8.

By Dr. Mercola

Dr. James Oschman is an expert in the field of energy medicine, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Biophysics and a PhD in Biology from the University of Pittsburgh.
As an author of a number of books, he is widely recognized as an authority in the biophysics of energy medicine. In this interview he discusses the practice of “earthing,” or grounding.
Every modern school of alternative medicine talks about “energy,” although they may use a variety of words to describe it. But what is this fundamental “energy” you keep hearing about?
As Dr. Oschman went about to investigate, he found there is very good science that can help demystify this nebulous term. He wrote a number of articles for a journal published by Churchill Livingstone on the subject, and after some encouragement from the publisher, those articles eventually resulted in two books: Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basisi, and Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performanceii.
Dr. Oschman was also introduced to earthing, or grounding, and his research in this area has turned up some very interesting and compelling information about how the energy from the Earth can help you live a healthier life. He has recently written the Foreword for a new book by Clinton Ober, Dr. Stephen T. Sinatra and M. Zucker, entitled Earthing: the most important health discovery ever?iii published in 2010 (Basic Health Publications, Inc., Laguna Beach, CA.).
If you’re like most people, you probably wear shoes with rubber or plastic soles for the better part of each day. Read on to learn why shoes might be one of the banes of modern existence.

The Emergence of “Earthing”

The concept of earthing, also known as grounding, was initially developed by Clint Ober. Stated in the simplest terms possible, earthing is simply walking barefoot; grounding your body to the Earth. Oschman was introduced to Ober via Jeff Spencer, the chiropractor for Lance Armstrong’s cycling team and an expert in treating professional athletes. 

“When Clint described the earthing phenomenon to Jeff, Jeff immediately called me and had me fly out to California to meet Clint and talk about what kind of research could be done to find out what is going on,” Oschman explains.
“People have known for a long time that walking barefoot feels good. There are places in the world like Germany and Austria and Switzerland with communities where there is a tradition of getting up in the morning and going barefoot.”

My own introduction to the concept of earthing was also through Jeff Spencer, some five or six years ago. I found it very intriguing, although I initially approached it with some skepticism. As you will soon see, it’s a simple concept—to some it may appear too simple.
Fortunately, Dr. Oschman is now able to provide the scientific groundwork for understanding what actually occurs. In fact, his team has now published about a dozen papers on this topic.

What Happens to You When You Walk Barefoot?

Your skin in general is a very good conductor. You can connect any part of your skin to the Earth, but if you compare various parts there is one that is especially potent, and that’s right in the middle of the ball of your foot; a point known to acupuncturists as Kidney 1 (K1). It’s a well-known point that conductively connects to all of the acupuncture meridians and essentially connects to every nook and cranny of your body. Interestingly, grounding—or rather the lack thereof—has a lot to do with the rise of modern diseases.
How is this?
Well, Dr. Oschman’s research into grounding has led him to better understand inflammation. I’ve discussed before, chronic inflammation is a primary cause of virtually all disease, from diabetes to cancer. And by looking at what happens during grounding, the answer to why chronic inflammation is so prevalent, and what is needed to prevent it, is becoming better understood.
When you’re grounded there’s a transfer of free electrons from the Earth into your body. And these free electrons are probably the most potent antioxidants known to man.
These antioxidants are responsible for the clinical observations from grounding experiments, such as:

Beneficial changes in heart rate
Decreased skin resistance
Decreased levels of inflammation

To better understand the science behind what happens during grounding and how it impacts the inflammatory response, Dr. Oschman begins by explaining what happens when you experience an injury.

“Even the slightest bump, if you bump the door, your immune system immediately responds by sending white blood cells (neutrophils) to the place of injury…
The neutrophils secrete a Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS)… called free radicals, in what’s referred to as an oxidative burst… These are like Pac-Man. They are very important molecules that tear things apart. If bacteria have gotten through your skin, these free radicals will destroy the bacteria very quickly. If you have damaged cells, the free radicals will break them apart so that there is a space for healthy cells to move in and repair the tissues.
That’s known as the inflammatory response.
What we have discovered that is truly profound is this: we now understand why you get the inflammatory response, which has five characteristics: pain, redness, heat, loss of range of motion, and swelling. All of those are the five hallmarks of inflammation and it turns out that that doesn’t have to happen.
Inflammation, which in medicine is considered an important part of the healing process, is really an artifact caused by lack of electrons in your tissues. What happens is, the neutrophils deliver the Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) to the site of injury, but in so doing, some of those free radicals can leak into the surrounding tissue and damage healthy tissue. That’s what creates the inflammatory response”.

Interestingly, grounding research has now discovered that if you place your feet on the ground after an injury (or on a grounded sheet, or place grounding patches on the balls of your feet), electrons will migrate into your body and spread through your tissues. Any free radicals that leak into the healthy tissue will immediately be electrically neutralized. This occurs because the electrons are negative, while the free radicals are positive, so they cancel each other out.

“So really what is happening with grounding or earthing is that you’re protecting your body from — I call it, collateral damage,” Dr. Oschman says. “Damage that was not intended to take place but does take place because we have disconnected ourselves from the Earth by putting rubber and plastic on the bottoms of our shoes.”

Earthing as an Anti-Aging Strategy

One of dominant theories on aging is the free radical theory, which is that aging occurs because of accumulative damage to your body caused by free radicals. You get free radicals when you have an injury or chronic inflammation, from breathing, and from the food you eat, among other things. While you don’t want to completely eliminate ALL free radicals, you do want to maintain a healthy balance of antioxidant electrons in your body to ensure the damage from free radicals doesn’t’ get out of hand.
Earthing can help accomplish this delicate balance. There are three kinds of sub-models of the aging process caused by free radicals.

DNA damage and mutation due to free radical damage
The mitochondrial theory. Mitochondria in every cell in your body carry out oxidative metabolism and a byproduct is free radicals. Eventually the mitochondria wear out or self-destruct due to excess free radicals
The protein cross linking theory, which explains why you get wrinkles in your skin. The proteins stick to each other, reducing the efficiency of enzymes

“It looks to me, from my study of biophysics and cell biology, like the body is designed with a semi-conductive fabric that connects everything in the body, including inside of every cell,” Dr. Oschman says.
“I refer to this system as the living matrix. Those electrons that enter the bottom of your foot can move anywhere in your body. Any place where a free radical forms, there are electrons nearby that can neutralize that free radical and prevent any of those processes: mitochondrial damage, cross linking of proteins, and mutation or genetic damage.
So the whole fabric is basically an antioxidant defense system that is in every part of our body.
We have this material called ground substance which is part of the connective tissue. It goes everywhere in the body. It’s a gel material and it stores electrons. So that if you go barefoot, you will take in electrons and your body will store them, and they will be available at any point where you might have an injury, or any point where a free radical might form…”

How Grounding Affects Your Blood

Another very important discovery, and one of the most recent, is that grounding thins your blood, making it less viscous. This discovery can have a profound impact on cardiovascular disease, which is now the number one killer in the world. Virtually every aspect of cardiovascular disease has been correlated with elevated blood viscosity. Dr. Sinatra has been coaching Dr. Oschman’s team in how to measure blood viscosity using a method called zeta potential. It measures the potential on your red blood cells by determining how fast they migrate in an electrical field.
It turns out that when you ground to the earth, your zeta potential quickly rises, which means your red blood cells have more charge on their surface, which forces them apart from each other. This action causes your blood to thin and flow easier. It also causes your blood pressure to drop.
Another obvious implication of this is that by repelling each other, your red blood cells are less inclined to stick together and form a clot. Blood clots don’t have to be very big to form like a pulmonary embolus that would kill you instantly, so this is a significant benefit. Additionally, if your zeta potential is high, which grounding can facilitate, you not only decrease your heart disease risk but also your risk of multi-infarct dementias, where you start losing brain tissue due to micro-clotting in your brain.

The Best Surfaces for Grounding

Clearly, the simplest way to ground is to walk barefoot outside when safe to do so. But what about urban or city dwellers who are surrounded by asphalt and concrete? Can you ground on those?  And what about natural surfaces—which ones are the most effective? There are indeed significant differences between various surfaces.
The ideal location for walking barefoot is the beach, close to or in the water, as sea water is a great conductor. Your body also contains mostly water, so it creates a good connection.
A close second would be a grassy area, especially if it’s covered with dew, which is what you’d find if you walk early in the morning. According to Dr. Oschman, concrete is a good conductor as long as it hasn’t been sealed. Painted concrete does not allow electrons to pass through very well. Materials like asphalt, wood, and typical insulators like plastic or the soles of your shoes, will not allow electrons to pass through and are not suitable for barefoot grounding.

Why Living in a High-Rise Could be Detrimental to Your Health

Additionally, there’s a major difference between standing outside in your bare feet and standing outside in shoes. And, how high up you are, off the surface of the Earth, without being grounded also matters. Why is this?
Dr. Oschman explains:

“The Earth’s surface is electrically charged and can push electrons up in your body. So from the top of your head to the Earth, there is a potential, which you don’t feel because it doesn’t cause any any particular current to flow, even though it can be a couple of hundred volts. If it did, it would give you a shock.
What happens is when the weather changes is that the potential can go up enormously. It can go from a hundred volts per meter to 10,000 volts per meter. That’s pre lightning. We’re talking about the potential that causes lightning to come to the earth. That voltage is well known and well understood…
This is the potential between the surface of the earth and the ionosphere, hundreds of miles up, which is very electrically active; charged by the solar wind, the charged particles that come from the sun. Those charged particles eventually reach the Earth by lightning and electrify the entire surface of the Earth so that anywhere you touch the Earth, there are electrons. They come originally from the sun, to the ionosphere, to the earth.
There is no lightning happening right here right now but somewhere there is lightning, a constant current flow from the ionosphere to the earth. Those are the electrons that your body needs for your immune system to function properly.”

What this means is that the higher up you are, separated from the surface of the Earth, the higher this potential would be, and the worse the implications for your health if you’re not grounded. For example, if you live on the 20th floor of a high-rise and you’re not grounded (using grounding technology, of course), the consequences to your health will be more significant than if you lived on the first floor. Likewise, when you wear rubber- or plastic-soled shoes, you are effectively shielding yourself from this beneficial influx of electrons from the Earth. For optimal immune function, you want these electrons to enter your body, so make sure you take your shoes off now and then!

Easy Ways to Incorporate Grounding Into Your Daily Life

Exercising barefoot outdoors is one of the most wonderful, inexpensive and powerful ways of incorporating earthing into your daily life and will also help speed up tissue repair and ease muscle pain due to strenuous exercise.

References:

A Special Interview with Dr. James Oschman. Video transcript.  
i Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, Amazon.com, June 15, 2000: James L. Oschman.
ii Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance, Amazon.com, March 8, 2003: James L. Oschman.
iii Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?, Amazon.com, April 9, 2010: Clinton Ober, et al.

By Dr. Mercola

More than three years ago, the Natural  Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), calling for the agency to prohibit the use of bisphenol-A (BPA), a known toxin, in products manufactured in the United States.

The FDA failed to respond, so NRDC sued last December, forcing the agency to give an answer.
Unfortunately, their response was like so many others they have given in the past – in favor of industry at the expense of public health.
The FDA announced that it would be denying NRDC’s petition to regulate the use of BPA in the U.S., noting that it would “make any necessary changes to BPA’s status based on the science.”
Well the science is pretty clear; what’s unclear is why the FDA is once again failing to act to protect your health.

What Does the Science Say About BPA?

BPA is an endocrine disrupter, which means it mimics and/or interferes with your body’s hormones and “disrupts” your endocrine system.
The glands of your endocrine system and the hormones they release are instrumental in regulating mood, growth and development, tissue function, metabolism, as well as sexual function and reproductive processes.
Some of the greatest concern regarding BPA surrounds early-life, in utero exposure to BPA, which can lead to chromosomal errors in your developing fetus, causing spontaneous miscarriages and genetic damage.
But evidence is also very strong indicating these chemicals are influencing adults and children, too, and leading to decreased sperm quality, early puberty, stimulation of mammary gland development, disrupted reproductive cycles and ovarian dysfunction, cancer and heart disease, among numerous other health problems.
For instance, research has found that “higher BPA exposure is associated with general and central obesity in the general adult population of the United States,”i while another study found that BPA is associated not only with generalized and abdominal obesity, but also with insulin resistance, which is an underlying factor in many chronic diseases.ii
In an NHANES study, published in 2010, U.S. adults with the highest levels of BPA in their urine were more than twice as likely to develop coronary heart disease as those with the lowest levels.iii
Those researchers noted:

“Higher BPA exposure, reflected in higher urinary concentrations of BPA, is consistently associated with reported heart disease in the general adult population of the USA.”

Dr. Sarah Janssen, senior scientist in the public health program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, stated:iv

“BPA is a toxic chemical that has no place in our food supply. We believe FDA made the wrong call. The agency has failed to protect our health and safety — in the face of scientific studies that continue to raise disturbing questions about the long-term effects of BPA exposures, especially in fetuses, babies and young children. The FDA is out-of-step with scientific and medical research. This illustrates the need for a major overhaul of how the government protects us against dangerous chemicals.”

Canada Declared BPA Toxic in 2010

In September 2010, Canada declared BPA a toxic substance, but to date no other country has followed suit, although BPA has been banned in baby bottles in Canada, Europe and the United States. Many U.S. companies have voluntarily removed the chemical from their products, however, in response to consumer demand.
It’s important to make an effort to support the companies that have already removed BPA from their products, or those that offer products that never contained it (such as baby toys made from natural fabrics instead of plastic). If enough people refuse to buy BPA-containing goods, companies will have no choice but to get this toxin out of their products.
For information on companies that are making efforts to explore BPA-free packaging or have already begun phasing BPA out of their products altogether, see the report Seeking Safer Packaging: Ranking Packaged Food Companies on BPA by the environmentally oriented investment firm Green Century and As You Sow, a non-profit working toward increasing corporate social responsibility. To date, companies including Hain Celestial, ConAgra, and H.J. Heinz have started using BPA-free can linings for certain products and has a timeline established to remove BPA from all of its packaging products.
Recently even Campbell Soup has jumped on the BPA-free bandwagon and declared their plans to stop using the chemical (an important move since studies show eating canned foods, which are in cans lined with BPA, increased study participants’ urinary concentrations of BPA by more than 1,000%).
Unfortunately, these removals will continue to be voluntary for now, as the FDA has only said that it will continue to examine the research on BPA’s health effects (while continuing to allow it in your food supply).

Nearly 5 Million Tons of BPA Will be Made in 2012 — Industry Set to Earn $8 Billion

Thanks to the FDA’s refusal to ban BPA from food packaging in the United States, the chemical will continue to experience steady growth in 2012, with an estimated 4.7 million tons set for production this year. This, in turn, will earn BPA manufacturers a handsome profit of $8 billion.v
Often you need only to follow the money trail to trace the FDA’s true motivations behind its regulatory decisions. In the first months of 2012 alone, the FDA has already ignored its own scientists (again) on the dangers of mercury fillings, and declared that it would not act to restrict agricultural antibiotic use. All this while attacking raw milk producers and even walnut manufacturers for making truthful health claims …
The FDA is packed by pro-industry, pro-corporation advocates who often have massive conflicts of interest when it comes to protecting the health of the public.
In fact, the revolving door between private industry and government oversight agencies like the FDA is so well established these days, it has become business as usual to read about scandal, conflicts of interest and blatant pro-industry bias, even when it flies in the face of science or the law. The fact is, if you want to stay safe, you can’t depend on the FDA; you’ve got to look out for yourself.

Avoid These Common Sources of Toxic BPA

As one of the world’s highest production volume chemicals, BPA is incredibly common in food and drinks packaging, as well as in other places you probably wouldn’t expect, like receipts. So it’s important to boycott the common sources of BPA that are still in production, such as:

Canned foods and soda cans
All BPA-containing plastics
Certain tooth sealants
Certain BPA-free plastics (which can contain similar endocrine-disrupting chemicals)
Receipts and currency (while you can’t “boycott” these, seek to limit or avoid carrying receipts in your wallet or purse, as it appears the chemical is transferring onto other surfaces it touches. It would also be wise to wash your hands after handling receipts and currency, and avoid handling them particularly if you’ve just put lotion or have any other greasy substance on your hands, as this may increase your exposure)

In addition, one way to help protect yourself from the adverse effects of inevitable BPA exposure is by eating traditionally fermented foods, such as raw grass-fed organic kefir, organic fermented veggies, like sauerkraut or Kimchi, or taking a high-quality probiotic supplement. These foods contain “friendly bacteria,” some of which have the ability to break down BPA, as well as reduce your intestinal absorption of it.vi

References:

i Environmental Research 2011 Aug;111(6):825-30.
ii The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. 2012 Feb;97(2):E223-7.
iii PLoS One. 2010 Jan 13;5(1):e8673.
iv NRDC Press Release March 30, 2012
v SFGate April 1, 2012
vi Bioscience, Biotechnology and Biochemistry 2008 Jun;72(6):1409-15.

By Dr. Mercola

UV light from the sun and tanning beds is the main vitamin D source for humans, and researchers have identified an astonishing number of health benefits of vitamin D in the past decade.
But since UV exposure has been suspected of causing skin cancer, many conventional health authorities still warn against it.
A recent review of studies sought to review the health effects of solar radiation, tanning beds and vitamin D.
The researchers looked at data from different time periods for populations at different latitudes, with the aim at looking at the relative risk for cutaneous malignant melanoma associated with tanning bed use, vitamin D and UV effects.
They found that increased tanning bed use was NOT associated with melanoma.
According to the authors:

“Due to the fear of skin cancer, health authorities warn against sun and sunbed exposure.
This policy, as well as the recommended vitamin D doses, may need revision.”
And:
“… The overall health benefit of an improved vitamin D status may be more important than the possibly increased [cutaneous malignant melanoma] risk resulting from carefully increasing UV exposure.”

In fact, Ivan Oransky, the editor of Reuters Health, has previously noted that the real risk of getting skin cancer from a tanning bed is less than three-tenths of one percent—and even then, this is likely only from those who habitually overexpose themselves.

Sun Exposure and Skin Cancer

The authors of the featured review state that while sun exposure is commonly assumed to be the main cause of cutaneous malignant melanoma (CMM hereafter referred to simply as melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer—the matter is actually NOT “settled.”
The theory is still under dispute, and in their analysis, they reviewed the arguments for and against causation.
With a hint of irony, the authors state that “several factors are probably involved, as exemplified by a relationship sometimes found between gross domestic product and melanoma incidence.” They also list a number of associations between sun exposure and melanoma found in the medical literature, such as:

Intermittent sun exposure and severe sunburn in childhood are associated with an increased risk of melanoma
Occupational exposure, such as farmers and fishermen, and regular weekend sun exposure are associated with decreased risk of melanoma
Sun exposure appears to protect against melanoma on skin sites not exposed to sun light, and melanoma occurring on skin with large UV exposure has the best prognosis
Patients with the highest blood levels of vitamin D have thinner melanoma and better survival prognosis than those with the lowest vitamin D levels.

So what about tanning beds—are they more dangerous than regular sun exposure? As you may recall, the Senate’s health-care overhaul bill now includes a 10 percent tax on tanning services to dissuade you from engaging in such “health-harming” activities; a move that is unquestionably short sighted and counterproductive considering the fact that vitamin D deficiency is rampant in the U.S.
Where tanning beds are concerned, the science is more conflicted, with some studies finding no detrimental impact from tanning beds on skin cancer rates while others have found that rates of skin cancer are higher in those using tanning beds than those who do not tan. The reason for these conflicting findings, the authors speculate, could very well be due to differences in UVA/UVB ratios and intensities between different types of tanning beds.

IF Sun Exposure Increases Your Risk of Cancer, Just How Great is that Risk?

Even when looking at the research showing an increased risk for skin cancer from sun exposure, just how great is that risk? Ivan Oransky, M.D., editor of Reuters Health wrote an excellent commentary on this last year.
Each year, during the month of May, as the sun slowly begins to thaw away those winter blues, you start getting bombarded with Skin Cancer Awareness ads; all of which pitch the idea that the sun is your enemy. Many will include the statistic issued by the World Health Organization, which states that “use of sunbeds before the age of 35 is associated with a 75 percent increase in the risk of melanoma.”
Sounds horrific, but how real is this threat?

“[W]hat does that really mean? Is it 75 percent greater than an already-high risk, or a tiny one?” Oransky writes.
“If you read the FDA’s “Indoor Tanning: The Risks of Ultraviolet Rays,” or a number of other documents from the WHO and skin cancer foundations, you won’t find your actual risk. That led AHCJ member Hiran Ratnayake to look into the issue in March for The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal, after Delaware passed laws limiting teens’ access to tanning salons. The 75 percent figure is based on a review of a number of studies, Ratnayake learned. The strongest such study was one that followed more than 100,000 women over eight years.
But as Ratnayake noted, that study “found that less than three-tenths of 1 percent who tanned frequently developed melanoma while less than two-tenths of 1 percent who didn’t tan developed melanoma.” That’s actually about a 55 percent increase, but when the study was pooled with others, the average was a 75 percent increase.
In other words, even if the risk of melanoma was 75 percent greater than two-tenths of one percent, rather than 55 percent greater, it would still be far below one percent.” [Emphasis mine.]

So, while statistically true, it’s really misleading, and incites undue fear. By only presenting the relative risk increase (the 75 percent increase) they make the risk sound rather unreasonable. Meanwhile, your absolute risk of developing skin cancer from sun exposure is still, AT WORST, below one percent! And please remember, these highly distorted scare tactics fail to mention the BENEFITS of the exposure, which radically reduce the dangers of the far more common, breast, prostate and colon cancers that are reduced.

Understanding the Difference between Relative Risk and Absolute Risk

Oransky explains the importance of understanding the difference between relative risk and absolute risk in his article:

“Absolute risk just tells you the chance of something happening, while relative risk tells you how that risk compares to another risk, as a ratio. If a risk doubles, for example, that’s a relative risk of 2, or 200 percent. If it halves, it’s 0.5, or 50 percent. Generally, when you’re dealing with small absolute risks, as we are with melanoma, the relative risk differences will seem much greater than the absolute risk differences.
You can see how if someone is lobbying to ban something – or, in the case of a new drug, trying to show a dramatic effect – they would probably want to use the relative risk. … So when you read a study that says something doubles the risk of some terrible disease, ask: Doubles from what to what?”

Tanning Beds Decrease Ten Times More Cancers than they Cause

Another important factor to keep in mind is that vitamin D, ideally from sun exposure, may decrease your risk of many other cancers and chronic diseases.
According to the featured review:

“… it can be estimated that increased sun exposure to the Norwegian population might at worst result in 200-300 more melanoma deaths per year, but it would elevate the vitamin D status by about 25 nmol/l and might result in 4,000 fewer internal cancers and about 3,000 fewer cancer deaths overall.
The lack of sunlight exposure leads to more health problems than bone disease and increased risk of cancer. Other benefits include protection against infectious diseases and non-cancerous diseases (diabetes, CVD, multiple sclerosis, and mental disorders).”

Overall, I believe the less than one percent risk of developing skin cancer from sun exposure or a tanning bed is well worth it, as increased vitamin D levels will protect you against so many other debilitating and lethal diseases and cancers… There’s also compelling research showing that sun exposure will indeed protect you against melanoma—the most dangerous form of skin cancer.

Sun Exposure is the BEST Way to Optimize Your Vitamin D Levels

In my view, a tanning bed comes in as a close second after natural sun exposure as the ideal way to optimize your vitamin D levels (as opposed to getting it from fortified food items or supplements). In a recent interview, Dr. Stephanie Seneff explained how vitamin D—specifically from sun exposure—is intricately tied to healthy cholesterol and sulfur levels, making the recommendation to get your vitamin D from the sun all the more important.
To review the details, please listen to the interview below.

Total Video Length: 1:29:57

Download Interview Transcript

The images used in this video belong to The United States Naval Observatory (USNO)
To find the information for your area, please visit the USNO site.
 
As a quick summary, when you expose your skin to sunshine or a tanning bed, your skin synthesizes vitamin D3 sulfate. This form of vitamin D is water soluble, unlike oral vitamin D3 supplements, which is unsulfated. The water soluble form can travel freely in your blood stream, whereas the unsulfated form needs LDL (the so-called “bad” cholesterol) as a vehicle of transport. Her suspicion is that the oral non-sulfated form of vitamin D may not provide all of the same benefits as the vitamin D created in your skin from sun exposure, because it cannot be converted to vitamin D sulfate.
I believe this is a very compelling reason to really make a concerted effort to get ALL your vitamin D requirements from exposure to sunshine, or by using a tanning bed. If neither of these are feasible options, then you should take an oral vitamin D3 supplement.
Carole agrees that sun exposure is ideal as it may also provide other health benefits. Lack of sun exposure now appears to be at the very root of many common health problems, which strict sun-avoidance has progressively made worse. Vitamin D deficiency is, after all, a fairly recent health concern, historically speaking.

“I think it is obvious that the reason we have this deficiency is because we have become an industrialized nation,” she says. “… What we’ve done is we’ve come inside. We cover up. Even in San Diego where I live, when they measured my level it was 18 ng/ml.
When we did a scientific test of what it’s going to take to get enough sun in San Diego… at my age – age is a factor in how much you absorb – we came to a test conclusion that it was going take 15 to 20 minutes a day in the prime time of UV, between 10 am and 2 pm, each and every day… with 40 percent of my body exposed. … I encourage people to take advantage of the sun. The only message I have about the sun is: don’t burn. That’s it.”

By Dr. Mercola

If you’re struggling with sleep deprivation, you may be tempted to try anything to get some quality sleep.
But you may want to think twice before filling a prescription for sleeping pills, as they not only fail to address the underlying reasons why you can’t sleep, but new research shows they’re linked to a nearly four-fold increase in the risk of death, along with increased cancer risks.

Would You Risk Your Life for a Good Night’s Sleep?

Most would not knowingly put their life on the line, but you may be doing just that if you take sleeping pills.
Research involving data from more than 10,500 people who received drugs for poor sleep (hypnotics) showed that “as predicted, patients prescribed any hypnotic had substantially elevated hazards of dying compared to those prescribed no hypnotics” and the association held true even when patients with poor health were taken into account — and even if the patients took fewer than 18 pills in a year.
The study suggested that those who take such medications are not only at higher risk for certain cancers, but are nearly four times more likely to die than people who don’t take them.
Sleeping pills linked to these risks included benzodiazepines (such as temazepam), non-benzodiazepines (such as Ambien, Lunesta, and Sonata), barbiturates, and sedative antihistamines.
The researchers concluded:

“Receiving hypnotic prescriptions was associated with greater than threefold increased hazards of death even when prescribed

By Dr. Mercola

Alzheimer’s disease is currently at epidemic proportions, with 5.4 million Americans — including one in eight people aged 65 and over — living with Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2011 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figuresi.
By 2050, this is expected to jump to 16 million, and in the next 20 years it is projected that Alzheimer’s will affect one in four Americans.
You do not, however, have to feel powerless against this disease, as although there is no known cure as of yet, there are simple strategies available to significantly lower your risk.

The Alzheimer’s Risk Factor You Probably Haven’t Heard Of …

Do you heed the advice of public health officials who advise putting on sunscreen every time you go out in the sun?
This could very well be raising your risk of Alzheimer’s disease because it blocks not only your body’s ability to produce vitamin D, but also your production of cholesterol sulfate.
Unfortunately most of you reading this have probably only heard of cholesterol referred to in a negative way, but actually adequate cholesterol is essential for good health.
For example, 25 percent of the cholesterol in your body is in your brain, even though your brain is only 2 percent of your body’s weight. The cholesterol is absolutely essential for neuron transport, which is why lack of cholesterol can negatively affect your brain function. But impaired memory and dementia are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to low cholesterol’s impact on your brain. Having too little of this beneficial compound also:

Increases your risk of depression
Can cause you to commit suicide
May lead to violent behavior and aggression
Increase your risk of cancer and Parkinson’s disease

That’s a bit of background to get you warmed up to the idea that cholesterol is your friend, not your enemy. Now, getting back to sunscreen and Alzheimer’s, using these products will make it virtually impossible for your body to do what it was designed to do, which is produce important, disease-fighting substances like vitamin D and cholesterol sulfate when exposed to the sun. Dr. Stephanie Seneffii, a senior scientist at MIT who has a wealth of information about the importance of sulfur, explains:

” … depletion of sulfate supply to the brain is another important contributor to Alzheimer’s, and I further think that sulfate is supplied to the brain principally by sterol sulfates like cholesterol sulfate as well as their derivatives like vitamin D3 sulfate. Both cholesterol sulfate and vitamin D3 sulfate are synthesized in the skin upon exposure to sunlight, and it is theorized that the skin is the major supplier of these nutrients to the body. This is why I believe that excess sunscreen use and excess sun avoidance are another principal causative factor in Alzheimer’s disease.”

Why is Cholesterol Sulfate so Important?

Your skin produces large amounts of cholesterol sulfate, which is water-soluble and provides a healthy barrier against bacteria and other potentially disease-causing pathogens that might otherwise enter your body through your skin. And, due to its polarity, it can enter both fat cells and muscle cells with equal ease. Dr. Seneff proposes that, because of this, cholesterol sulfate may be able to protect fat and muscle cells from glucose and oxygen damage.
She also argues that when you’re deficient in cholesterol sulfate, your muscle and fat cells become more prone to damage, which subsequently can lead to glucose intolerance, a condition where your muscles cannot process glucose as a fuel. As a result, your fat cells have to store more fat in order to supply fuel to your muscles, and excess fat accumulates as damage increases.
Sulfur also plays an important role in glucose metabolism. She hypothesizesiii that if a sufficient amount of sulfur is available, it will act as a decoy to glucose, effectively diverting it to reduce the sulfur rather than glycating and causing damage. This would have the beneficial effect of reducing inflammation, as sugar (glucose) is highly inflammatory and wreaks havoc in your body.
What does this have to do with your brain? The process applies not only to fat and muscle cells, but also to cells in your brain (and, in fact, to all cells in your body). Dr. Seneff explains:

“Essentially all cells in the body are surrounded by an exterior coat made up of complex molecules called “GAGs” — glycosaminoglycans. These contain sugars, proteins, and a large population of attached ions, particularly sulfate anions. These serve, I believe, an important role in helping to safely break down sugar. Simply stated, the sulfur atom deflects the reducing actions of sugars away from the vulnerable proteins.
The sulfate anions also provide a negative field around the cell, which is very useful for keeping bacteria out, because bacteria are also negatively charged, and hence repelled by the cell’s negative electric field. So cells with lots of surrounding sulfate are afforded protection from invasive bacteria. If a bacterium does get in, the cell will have to release oxidizing agents to kill it, and the cell itself will suffer damage from exposure to its own defense system. The fats in the cell membrane are more vulnerable to oxidative damage when there is insufficient cholesterol to protect them.”

This means that depletion of the sulfate supply to your brain could leave your brain cells more susceptible to damage and may increase your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Seneff also points out to recent papers that have also linked insufficient cholesterol with Alzheimer’s and mental decline:

Serum levels of cholesterol as well as the ability to synthesize cholesterol are inversely associated with mental declineiv in the elderly
A study directly comparing Alzheimer’s patients with age-matched controls showed a reduced serum level of LDL in the Alzheimer’s patientsv, with the more severe cases showing further reduction in LDL

Vitamin D Deficiency Also Increase Alzheimer’s Risk

Sunscreen is a double-edged sword when it comes to your brain health, as aside from blocking your ability to produce cholesterol sulfate, it also blocks your production of vitamin D — and there is no shortage of research linking vitamin D to brain health. One such study was actually launched after family members of Alzheimer’s patients who were treated with large doses of prescription vitamin D reported they were acting and performing better than before.
Strong links between low levels of vitamin D in Alzheimer’s patientsvi and poor outcomes on cognitive tests were revealed. Researchers believe that optimal vitamin D levels may enhance the amount of important chemicals in your brain and protect brain cells. Vitamin D may also exert some of its beneficial effects on Alzheimer’s through its anti-inflammatory and immune-boosting properties. Sufficient vitamin D is imperative for proper functioning of your immune system to combat inflammation that is also associated with Alzheimer’s.

Safe Sun Exposure Without Sunscreen

If you work outdoors all day as part of your job, or if you need to protect sensitive areas of your face, like around your eyes, that are particularly susceptible to photoaging and not large enough a surface to impact vitamin D levels if blocked with sunscreen, certain sunscreens available in most health food stores, and my Healthy Skin Sunscreen, are safe to use when the need arises. However, I personally use and recommend wearing a hat when you are in the sun as this typically can shade the sensitive skin around your eyes.
I would avoid applying sunscreen regularly as most commercial ones have toxic chemicals that you should not be exposed to. If you do use a sunscreen make sure it is safe and natural. Remember once your skin turns the lightest shade of pink (if you’re Caucasian), it’s time to get out of the sun. Past this point of exposure your body will not produce any more vitamin D and you’ll begin to have sun damage. And sunburn anywhere on your body is not good for your health.
If sunshine outdoors is not an option for you because of the winter or your job, you can get many of the same benefits by using a safe tanning bed (one with electronic ballasts rather than magnetic ballasts, to avoid unnecessary exposure to electromagnetic fields). Safe tanning beds also have less of the dangerous UVA than sunlight, while unsafe ones have more UVA than sunlight.
In terms of vitamin D, it’s especially important to get it from sun exposure or a tanning bed, rather than a vitamin D3 supplement if at all possible, because when you expose your skin to sunshine, your body produces vitamin D3 sulfate. This form of vitamin D is water-soluble, unlike oral vitamin D3 supplements, which is unsulfated. The water-soluble form can travel freely in your bloodstream, whereas the unsulfated form needs LDL (the so-called “bad” cholesterol) as a vehicle of transport. Dr. Seneff believes that the oral non-sulfated form of vitamin D may not provide all of the same benefits as the vitamin D created in your skin from sun exposure, because it cannot be converted to vitamin D sulfate.

Coconut Oil Offers Profound Benefits for Your Brain

Coconut oil may help protect you from Alzheimer’s by providing your brain with an additional fuel supply. Your brain actually manufactures its own insulin to convert glucose into the fuel it needs, but recent discoveries indicate that your brain can essentially become “diabetic.” As you may know, diabetes is the condition where your body’s response to insulin is weakened due to “insulin resistance”—your body eventually stops producing the insulin necessary to regulate blood sugar.
Just like with diabetes, your brain can become insulin resistant. If this happens, your brain loses its ability to convert glucose into energy, leading to essentially a starvation state, and this can result in brain atrophy. This is what happens to Alzheimer’s patients—portions of their brain start to atrophy, or starve, leading to impaired functioning and eventual loss of memory, speech, movement and personality. Given this, you can now understand why diabetics have a 65 percent increased risk of also being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease—BOTH conditions are tied to insulin resistance.
This is where coconut oil may help.
Coconut oil provides ketones to your brain, and ketones appear to be the preferred source of brain food in patients with diabetes and/or Alzheimer’s. Coconut oil is a primary source of ketones, since it contains 66 percent medium chain triglycerides (MCTs), a type of fat your body can easily and quickly convert into ketones.
In effect, coconut oil is a fat that acts like a carbohydrate in your body, and carbs are your brain’s favorite food. For more about this, refer to this article, which discusses this in more detail. Therapeutic levels of MCTs can be achieved by taking just over two tablespoons of coconut oil daily (about 35ml or 7 level teaspoons), but I recommend working your way up to 4 tablespoons per day, gradually, beginning with just one teaspoon in the morning, WITH a meal to minimize the risk of stomach upset.

Other Important Tips for Alzheimer’s Prevention

In order to effectively prevent a disease, you must address its underlying causative factors. Although we do not have definitive “proof” of what, specifically, causes Alzheimer’s, a number of factors have been linked to an increased risk of dementia, and we know enough about those to in turn make educated recommendations for preventing this type of brain deterioration. Some of the best strategies for Alzheimer’s prevention, aside from adequate sunlight exposure, include:

Fructose. You simply MUST keep your level below 25 grams per day. This toxic influence is serving as the master regulator of brain toxicity. Since the average person is exceeding this recommendation by 300% this is a pervasive and serious issue. I view this as the MOST important step you can take.

Additionally, when your liver is busy processing fructose (which your liver turns into fat), it severely hampers its ability to make cholesterol. This is yet another important facet that explains how and why excessive fructose consumption is so detrimental to your health.
Keep your fasting insulin levels below 3. This is indirectly related to fructose, as it will clearly lead to insulin resistance. However other sugars, grains and lack of exercise are also factors here.
Vitamin B12: According to a small Finnish study recently published in the journal Neurologyvii, people who consume foods rich in B12 may reduce their risk of Alzheimer’s in their later years. For each unit increase in the marker of vitamin B12 (holotranscobalamin) the risk of developing Alzheimer’s was reduced by 2 percent. Very high doses of B vitamins have also been found to treat Alzheimer’s disease and reduce memory loss.
Eat a nutritious diet, rich in folate, such as the one described in my nutrition plan. Strict vegetarian dietsviii have been shown to increase your Alzheimer’s risk, whereas diets high in omega-3’s lower your riskix. However, vegetables, without question, are your best form of folate, and we should all eat plenty of fresh raw veggies every day.
High-quality animal based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil. (I recommend avoiding most fish because although fish is naturally high in omega-3, most fish are now severely contaminated with mercury.) High intake of the omega-3 fatty acid DHA helps by preventing cell damage caused by Alzheimer’s disease, thereby slowing down its progression, and lowering your risk of developing the disorder. Researchers have also said DHA “dramatically reduces the impact of the Alzheimer’s gene.”
Avoid and remove mercury from your body. Dental amalgam fillings are one of the major sources of mercury, however you should be healthy prior to having them removed. Once you have adjusted to following the diet described in my optimized nutrition plan, you can follow the mercury detox protocol and then find a biological dentist to have your amalgams removed.
Avoid aluminum, such as antiperspirants, non-stick cookware, vaccine adjuvants, etc.
Exercise regularly. It’s been suggested that exercise can trigger a change in the way the amyloid precursor protein is metabolizedx, thus, slowing down the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s. Exercise also increases levels of the protein PGC-1alpha. New research has shown that people with Alzheimer’s have less PGC-1alpha in their brainsxi, and cells that contain more of the protein produce less of the toxic amyloid protein associated with Alzheimer’s.

I would strongly recommend reviewing the Peak Fitness Technique for my specific recommendations.
Avoid flu vaccinations as most contain both mercury and aluminum!
Eat plenty of blueberries. Wild blueberries, which have high anthocyanin and antioxidant content, are known to guard against Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases.
Challenge your mind daily. Mental stimulation, especially learning something new, such as learning to play an instrument or a new language, is associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s. Researchers suspect that mental challenge helps to build up your brain, making it less susceptible to the lesions associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Avoid anticholinergic and statin drugs. Drugs that block acetylcholine, a nervous system neurotransmitter, have been shown to increase your risk of dementia. These drugs include certain night-time pain relievers, antihistamines, sleep aids, certain antidepressants, medications to control incontinence, and certain narcotic pain relievers.

A study found that those who took drugs classified as ‘definite anticholinergics’ had a four times higher incidence of cognitive impairmentxii. Regularly taking two of these drugs further increased the risk of cognitive impairment. Statin drugs are particularly problematic because they suppress the synthesis of cholesterol.

As Dr. Seneff reports:

“Statin drugs interfere with cholesterol synthesis in the liver, but the lipophilic statin drugs (like lovastatin and simvastatin) also interfere with the synthesis of cholesterol in the brain. This would then directly impact the neurons’ ability to maintain adequate cholesterol in their membranes. Indeed, a population-based study showed that people who had ever taken statins had an increased risk of Alzheimer’s diseasexiii, a hazard ratio of 1.21. More alarmingly, people who used to take statins had a hazard ratio of 2.54 (over two and a half times the risk to Alzheimer’s) compared to people who never took statins.”

For more information, read Dr. Seneff’s essay on statins and Alzheimer’s diseasexiv.

By Dr. Mercola

Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) are a complex group of compounds formed when sugar reacts with amino acids.
This can occur both in the food you eat, and inside your body.
It’s is a fitting acronym because – along with oxidation – it’s one of the major molecular mechanisms whereby damage accrues in your body, which leads to disease, aging, and eventually, death.
For example, there is mounting evidence that AGEs may be implicated in the development of the chronic degenerative diseases associated with aging, including but not limited to:

Cardiovascular disease
Alzheimer’s disease, and
Diabetes

Several studies have shown that restricting the consumption of AGEs can lead to an increased lifespan in animal models.
According to a paper that summarizes recent research on AGEsi:

“… [T]he data are supportive that endogenous AGEs are associated with declining organ functioning. It appears that dietary AGEs may also be related.
… As of today, restriction of dietary intake of AGEs and exercise has been shown to safely reduce circulating AGEs, with further reduction in oxidative stress and inflammatory markers.”

Why Limiting Sugar is Key for Longevity

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 AGEs and speeds up the aging process. It 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 on fructose, 16 volunteers on a controlled diet including high levels of fructose produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs in just 10 weeks!
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 of premature aging and age-related chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease. 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 stereotypical 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 white bread, sugar, pasta, pastries, cookies, and candy, which also break down to sugar in your body, it’s not so difficult to see why so many Americans are in such poor health.
This type of high-sugar (high-carb) diet is also what’s driving the obesity epidemic—not diets high in fat. An infographic created by Column Five for Massive Health, based on Why We Get Fat by science writer Gary Taubes, explains why. In short, carbs, like fructose and other sugars, destroy your insulin and leptin sensitivity, which in turn causes your cells to accumulate more fat, and makes it more difficult to get rid of the extra weight as well. So, the bottom line is this: If you want to look and feel younger longer, avoid all forms of sugar (including grains) as much as possible!

IMAGE COURTESY OF MASSIVE HEALTH. READ ABOUT THIS INFOGRAPHIC

Glycation 101

Fructose adversely affects your body in a number of ways, but one of the mechanisms that causes significant damage is glycation. As already mentioned, glycation is the process in which sugar bonds with protein to form advanced glycation end products, or AGEs.
This process creates inflammation, which can activate your immune system.
Macrophages are scavenger cells that are part of your immune defense system, and as such they have special receptors for AGEs, aptly called RAGEs (think: raging inflammation). These RAGEs bind to the AGEs in your body and get rid of them. Unfortunately, this defensive process can also cause its fair share of damage. Inside your arteries, for example, the scar tissue created from this process is called plaque.
You really want to limit the AGEs in your body as much as possible, so your immune system won’t have to work so hard to defend against them. As a standard recommendation to limit glycation, 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 a predictor for fructose toxicity. (For more information on this, please see this previous article.) This includes keeping track of your fructose intake from whole fruits. For additional information about the fructose content of common fruits, please see this helpful fructose chart. I recommend this lower level simply because if you consume processed foods or sweet beverages at all, you’re virtually guaranteed to consume “hidden” sources of fructose.

Fructose Metabolism Basics

Anyone who still insists that “sugar is sugar” is way behind the times… There are in fact major differences in how your body processes different sugars, and it’s important to understand that when you consume fructose, your body packs on pounds at a much higher rate than it does when you consume glucose. The following summary details the main metabolic differences between fructose and glucose to help you understand how fructose can wreak such havoc with your health, and why it’s considerably worse for you than glucose:

After eating fructose, nearly all of the metabolic burden rests on your liver. But with glucose, your liver has to break down only 20 percent.
Every cell in your body, including your brain, utilizes glucose. Therefore, much of it is “burned up” immediately after you consume it. By contrast, fructose is primarily converted into free fatty acids (FFAs), VLDL (the damaging form of cholesterol), and triglycerides, which get stored as fat.
The fatty acids created during fructose metabolism accumulate as fat droplets in your liver and skeletal muscle tissues, causing insulin resistance and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Insulin resistance progresses to metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes.
Fructose is the most lipophilic carbohydrate. In other words, fructose converts to activated glycerol (g-3-p), which is directly used to turn FFAs into triglycerides. The more g-3-p you have, the more fat you store. Glucose does not do this.
When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose results in 40 calories being stored as fat. Fructose is essentially largely converted into fat!
The metabolism of fructose by your liver creates a long list of waste products and toxins, including a large amount of uric acid, which triggers your “fat switch,” causing you to gain more weight.
Glucose does not do this, as it suppresses the hunger hormone ghrelin and stimulates leptin, which suppresses your appetite. Fructose has no effect on ghrelin and interferes with your brain’s communication with leptin, resulting in overeating.

How to Tame Your Sugar Cravings

As mentioned earlier, I recommend that you avoid as much sugar as possible. Do your best to keep your fructose consumption below 15-25 grams a day. This is especially important if you are overweight or have diabetes, high cholesterol, or high blood pressure.
Sugar is highly addictive, so cutting down can be a real challenge for some, especially if you’re consuming very high amounts. If you’re struggling with sugar addiction, I highly recommend trying an energy psychology technique called Turbo Tapping, which has helped many “soda addicts” kick their sweet habit. If you still want to use a sweetener occasionally, here’s what I recommend in lieu of sugar:

Use the sweet herb stevia.
Use organic cane sugar in moderation.
Use organic raw honey in moderation.
Avoid ALL artificial sweeteners, which can damage your health even more quickly than fructose.
Avoid agave syrup since it is a highly processed sap that is almost all fructose. Your blood sugar will spike just as it would if you were consuming regular sugar or HFCS. Agave’s meteoric rise in popularity is due to a great marketing campaign, but any health benefits present in the original agave plant are processed out.

The Anti-Aging Lifestyle

Of all the healthy lifestyle strategies I know of that can have a significant impact on your longevity, normalizing your insulin and leptin levels is probably the most important. Cutting out sugar and grains and increasing exercise are two effective ways to accomplish that.
But to truly optimize your longevity and slow down the clock, your entire lifestyle needs to be taken into account. So, here are the rest of my top “anti-aging” recommendations. Incorporating these healthy lifestyle guidelines will help set you squarely on the path to optimal health and give you the best shot at living a much longer life:

Learn how to effectively cope with stress – Stress has a direct impact on inflammation, which in turn underlies many of the chronic diseases that kill people prematurely every day, so developing effective coping mechanisms is a major longevity-promoting factor.
Meditation, prayer, physical activity and exercise are all viable options that can help you maintain emotional and mental equilibrium. I also strongly believe in using energy psychology tools such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) to address deeper, oftentimes hidden emotional problems.

Eat a healthy diet focused on whole, ideally organic, foods – My nutrition plan, based on natural whole foods, is your first step toward increasing your chances of living a longer, healthier life.
Optimize Your Vitamin D Levels. This is another very powerful and inexpensive intervention that can have profound benefits on your health. In the summer you can do this for free by careful and safe sun exposure. In the winter a therapeutic level of oral vitamin D can be achieved with an oral supplement (around 8,000 units of vitamin D3 a day for most adults)
Animal based omega-3 fats – Correcting the ratio of omega-3 to healthful omega-6 fats is a strong factor in helping you live longer. This typically means increasing your intake of animal based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil, while decreasing your intake of damaged omega-6 fats (think trans fats).
I do not, however, recommend the new prescription strength fish oil medication, sold under the name Lovaza. Don’t be fooled by their “all-natural” PR campaign. This is actually a drug to treat very high triglyceride levels. However, as with most other drugs, Lovaza comes with potentially dangerous side effects that you would not experience with a natural fish oil or krill oil supplement. Side effects include flu-like symptoms, infections, back pain, skin rashes, upset stomach, taste changes, digestive issues, chest pain, migraines and respiratory problems!
Additionally, new research strongly suggests that 500 mg of krill oil is more potent and far less expensive.

Get your antioxidants from foods –Good sources include blueberries, cranberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, beans, and artichokes.
Use coconut oil – Another excellent anti-aging food is coconut oil, known to reduce your risk of heart disease and lower your cholesterol, among other things. In fact, it’s doubly beneficial because it can be both eaten and applied directly to your skin. Coconut oil can be used in place of other oils, margarine, butter, or shortening, and can be used for all your cooking needs.
Get your resveratrol naturally – Resveratrol is one of the forerunners in the anti-aging pill race, but more than likely, by the time they’ve manipulated it into a synthetic pill (like the fish oil discussed above), it won’t be healthy for you.
Although resveratrol is the antioxidant found in red wine, I can’t recommend drinking wine in the hopes of extending your life because alcohol is a neurotoxin that can poison your brain and harm your body’s delicate hormonal balance. Instead, get your resveratrol from natural sources, such as whole grape skins and seeds, raspberries, mulberries, and peanuts.

Exercise regularly and smartly — Studies repeatedly show that regular, moderate-to-vigorous exercise can help prevent or delay your onset of hypertension, obesity, heart disease, osteoporosis, and the falls that lead to hip fracture. Although a lifetime of regular exercise is ideal, it’s never too late to start. It’s been shown that even individuals in their 70’s can substantially increase both strength and endurance with exercise.
High-intensity, interval training can also increase longevity as this specific style of training promotes human growth hormone production – yet another aspect of the longevity puzzle.

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.
Avoid pharmaceutical drugs – Pharmaceutical drugs kill thousands of people prematurely every year – as an expected side effect of the action of the drug. And, if you adhere to a healthy lifestyle, you most likely will never need any of them in the first place.

Reference:

i Dietary Advanced Glycation End Products and Aging,Nutrients. 2010 December; 2(12): 1247–1265

$29 Billion Introduction from 29billion on Vimeo.By Dr. Mercola

Millions of people around the world take medications known as statins to lower their cholesterol.
The current value of the cholesterol-lowering drug industry is estimated at around $29 billion — and this is clearly a conservative estimate considering spending on cholesterol drugs in the United States alone reached nearly $19 billion in 2010.
But have the facts about cholesterol and heart disease been distorted by drug companies eager to increase their profits? 
A new documentary film project is underway to look for answers, and get the truth out about cholesterol once and for all…

Why Haven’t You Heard the Truth About Cholesterol?

There may be $29 billion very good reasons why … and this is the premise behind the new documentary film $29 Billion Reasons to Lie About Cholesterol (based on a book by the same name, authored by Justin Smith). As the film’s synopsis explains:

“So many resources are currently directed at cholesterol-lowering, however, a huge body of evidence suggests that this cholesterol-lowering is having little or no effect on people’s health. In fact, it may even be doing more harm than good.
We want to present the facts about cholesterol to the general public. These facts are fully supported by published studies within the medical literature, but unfortunately they are hardly ever discussed.
The pharmaceutical industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year promoting the idea that high cholesterol causes heart disease. The other side of the story receives very little attention. As a result, even doctors may have been misled; since they have only been exposed to the pharmaceutical industry’s viewpoint.”

Could it be possible that nearly everything your doctor and the media is telling you about high cholesterol and how it relates to saturated fats, heart disease and strokes is wrong?
Absolutely!
Could it also be possible that the makers of statin drugs are generating massive ill-gotten profits of this completely misguided and patently incorrect medical dogma — while patients, maybe even you or someone you love, are risking poor health or even death as a result? Yes!  And it’s time the word got out.

Does Lower Cholesterol Really Lead to Better Health?

A major clue that something is very off with the notion that high cholesterol causes heart disease can be found in this: even as cholesterol levels have become lower, rates of heart disease deaths have not followed suit!
In a report by Smith, it’s noted:

” … between 1994 and 2006 the percentage of men aged 65 to 74 with ‘high’ cholesterol decreased from 87% to 54% … Despite this, the rate of coronary heart disease for this age group stayed about the same … Other age groups have experienced an increase in the rate of heart disease as the number of people with ‘high’ cholesterol has decreased.”

Now here’s something you might find surprising: it turns out evidence linking high cholesterol to heart disease is actually weak, including the results of the Framingham Heart Study, which is often cited as proof of the lipid hypothesis (the notion that dietary fat leads to high cholesterol and causes heart disease).
The Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 and involved some 6,000 people from the town of Framingham, Massachusetts who filled out detailed questionnaires about their lifestyle habits and diets. The study is credited with identifying heart disease risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure, lack of exercise and, yes, high cholesterol.
Despite being widely publicized, the cholesterol link was weak, as researchers noted those who weighed more and had abnormally high blood cholesterol levels were slightly more at risk for future heart disease. What you don’t hear about is the fact that the more cholesterol and saturated fat people ate, the lower their cholesterol levels. In a 1992 editorial published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. William Castelli, a former director of the Framingham Heart study, stated:

“In Framingham, Mass., the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol … We found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least and were the most physically active.”

Cholesterol is simply not the main perpetrator causing heart disease. Dr. Stephen Sinatra, a board certified cardiologist and a prominent expert in the field of natural cardiology, explained in a recent interview: 

“Let’s face it, cholesterol is something your body needs. If you look at the MRFIT study [Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial] where they looked at 180,000 men over a period of… 13 years (1973-80); men with cholesterol of 330 had less hemorrhagic stroke than men with cholesterol less than 180. If you look at cholesterol numbers, the higher cholesterol number would give you protection from hemorrhagic stroke. (I’m not talking about ischemic stroke now but hemorrhagic stroke.)
… [W]e need cholesterol in our skin to activate vitamin D3 from sunlight.  We need cholesterol to make our sex hormones… to make our adrenal hormones.  We need it for lubrication.  We need it for neurotransmitter function in the brain. When LDL is driven too low, it’s no wonder that a lot of patients develop memory problems or pre-Alzheimer’s, or even total global amnesia, which is really losing one’s memory.  It’s very frightful and I have seen several cases.… There are so many other aspects that in my mind play a much bigger role that I put cholesterol down at the low end of the spectrum.”

Most of Your Body’s Cholesterol is Made by Your Liver, Not “Ingested” Via Your Diet

If high cholesterol and high-fat diets are really NOT the cause of heart disease, then how did this massive misinformation campaign start? It actually started more than 100 years ago when the lipid hypothesis was developed by a German pathologist named Rudolph Virchow. After studying arterial plaques from corpses, he theorized that cholesterol in your blood led to the development of plaques in your arteries.
Meanwhile, in 1913 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nikolaj Nikolajewitsch Anitschkow fed rabbits cholesterol and determined that it led to atherosclerotic changes (apparently no one questioned the fact that rabbits are herbivores and do not naturally consume cholesterol!).
This started the notion that eating cholesterol leads to plaque deposits in your arteries, and at that time it was believed that all cholesterol in your blood was due to dietary sources. This, however, is not true, as it’s now known that your liver makes about 75 percent of your body’s cholesterol. That’s right! Even if you didn’t eat any cholesterol, you would still have cholesterol in your body, which is a good thing considering it’s needed by every one of your cells to produce cell membranes.
Your diet is actually an afterthought when it comes to what your cholesterol levels will be, but this simple truth is largely ignored or unrealized even by many physicians. In fact, statins are actually HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, that is, they act by blocking the enzyme in your liver that is responsible for making cholesterol (HMG-CoA reductase).

How Low Should Your Cholesterol Go? Official Guidelines Unsupported by Research, Influenced by Drug Company Dollars

The other interesting point to the cholesterol myth has to do with how low your levels should actually go; this, too, is a product of misinformation. In 2004, the U.S. government’s National Cholesterol Education Program panel advised those at risk for heart disease to attempt to reduce their LDL cholesterol to new specific, very low, levels.
Before 2004, a 130-milligram LDL cholesterol level was considered healthy.
The updated guidelines, however, recommended levels of less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk — levels that often require multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs to achieve. In 2006, a review in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that there is insufficient evidence to support the target numbers outlined by the panel. The authors of the review were unable to find research providing evidence that achieving a specific LDL target level was important in and of itself, and found that the studies attempting to do so suffered from major flaws.
Several of the scientists who helped develop the guidelines even admitted that the scientific evidence supporting the less-than-70 recommendation was not very strong! So how did these excessively low cholesterol guidelines come about?  Eight of the nine doctors on the panel that developed the new cholesterol guidelines 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.
The Washington Post reported:

“The extent of the connections was stunning: Of the nine members of the panel that wrote the guidelines, six had each received research grants, speaking honoraria or consulting fees from at least three and in some cases all five of the manufacturers of statins; only one had no financial links at all. If all the members with conflicts had recused themselves, in fact, only two would have been left.”

Did You Know Statins Can Actually Harm Your Heart?

While statin drugs do lower cholesterol very effectively, if cholesterol is not the culprit in heart disease, what purpose does this serve?  A new look at statin cholesterol-lowering drugs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims that no study has ever proven that statins improve all-cause mortality — in other words, they don’t prolong your life any longer than if you’d not taken them at all. And rather than improving your life, they actually contribute to a deterioration in the quality of your life, destroying muscles and endangering liver, kidney and even heart function.
According to Stephanie Seneff, author of this stunning revelation:

“Statin drugs inhibit the action of an enzyme, HMG coenzyme A reductase, that catalyses an early step in the 25-step process that produces cholesterol. This step is also an early step in the synthesis of a number of other powerful biological substances that are involved in cellular regulation processes and antioxidant effects.
One of these is coenzyme Q10, present in the greatest concentration in the heart, which plays an important role in mitochondrial energy production and acts as a potent antioxidant …
Statins also interfere with cell-signaling mechanisms mediated by so-called G-proteins, which orchestrate complex metabolic responses to stressed conditions. Another crucial substance whose synthesis is blocked is dolichol, which plays a crucial role in the endoplasmic reticulum. We can’t begin to imagine what diverse effects all of this disruption, due to interference with HMG coenzyme A reductase, might have on the cell’s ability to function … There can be no doubt that statins will make your remaining days on earth a lot less pleasant than they would otherwise be … ”

Take one study in Clinical Cardiology, which found heart muscle function was “significantly better” in the control group than in those taking statin drugs! The researchers concluded:

“Statin therapy is associated with decreased myocardial [heart muscle] function.”

What’s often the end result when your heart muscle function is weakened or decreased? Heart failure! The study did not address causes, but it’s widely known that statins lower your CoQ10 levels by blocking the pathway involved in cholesterol production — the same pathway by which Q10 is produced. Statins also reduce the blood cholesterol that transports CoQ10 and other fat-soluble antioxidants.
The loss of CoQ10 leads to loss of cell energy and increased free radicals which, in turn, can further damage your mitochondrial DNA, effectively setting into motion an evil circle of increasing free radicals and mitochondrial damage. As your body gets more and more depleted of CoQ10, you may suffer from fatigue, muscle weakness and soreness, and eventually heart failure, so it is imperative if you take statin drugs that you take CoQ10 or, if you are over the age of 40, the reduced version called ubiquinol.

Statins Increase Your Risk of Chronic Disease

Statins appear to provoke serious risks of chronic disease, including diabetes, through a few different mechanisms. One primary mechanism is by increasing your insulin levels, which can be extremely harmful to your health. Chronically elevated insulin levels cause inflammation in your body, which is the hallmark of most chronic disease. In fact, elevated insulin levels lead to heart disease, which, ironically, is the primary reason for taking a statin drug in the first place!
It can also promote belly fat, high blood pressure, heart attacks, chronic fatigue, thyroid disruption, and diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. These drugs have also been directly linked to over 300 side effects, which include:

Cognitive loss
Neuropathy
Anemia

Acidosis
Frequent fevers
Cataracts

Sexual dysfunction
An increase in cancer risk
Pancreatic dysfunction

Immune system suppression
Muscle problems, polyneuropathy (nerve damage in the hands and feet), and rhabdomyolysis, a serious degenerative muscle tissue condition
Hepatic dysfunction. (Due to the potential increase in liver enzymes, patients must be monitored for normal liver function)

Did You Know?

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Learn the better indicator of heart disease risk than just your total cholesterol – plus the dangers of statins and the need to supplement with CoQ10 if you’re taking these cholesterol-lowering drugs – through our infographic “How to Make Sense of Your Cholesterol Levels.” Use the embed code to share it on your website.
Learn the better indicator of heart disease risk than just your total cholesterol – plus the dangers of statins and the need to supplement with CoQ10 if you’re taking these cholesterol-lowering drugs – through our infographic “How to Make Sense of Your Cholesterol Levels.”

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Are You Ready to Stop Buying Into the Cholesterol Lie?

The bottom line is this: your body NEEDS cholesterol — it is important in the production of cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D and bile acids that help you to digest fat. Cholesterol also helps your brain form memories and is vital to your neurological function. Further, there’s no doubt that statin drugs can wreak havoc with your health, and there’s compelling evidence that most people who currently take them simply do not need them.
If your physician is urging you to check your total cholesterol, then you should also know that this test will tell you virtually nothing about your risk of heart disease, unless it is 330 or higher. HDL percentage is a far more potent indicator for heart disease risk. Here are the two ratios you should pay attention to:

HDL/Total Cholesterol Ratio: Should ideally be above 24 percent. If below 10 percent, you have a significantly elevated risk for heart disease.
Triglyceride/HDL Ratio: Should be below 2.

The fact is that 75 percent of your cholesterol is produced by your liver, which is influenced by your insulin levels. Therefore, if you optimize your insulin level, you will automatically optimize your cholesterol! By modifying your diet and lifestyle in the following ways, you can safely optimize your cholesterol and lower your risk of heart disease at the same time:

Reduce, with the plan of eliminating, grains and sugars in your diet, replacing them with mostly whole, fresh vegetable carbs. Also try to consume a good portion of your food raw. 
Make sure you are getting enough high quality, animal-based omega 3 fats, such as krill oil.
Other heart-healthy foods include olive oil, coconut and coconut oil, organic raw dairy products and eggs, avocados, raw nuts and seeds, and organic grass-fed meats.
Exercise daily.
Avoid smoking or drinking alcohol excessively.
Be sure to get plenty of good, restorative sleep.

One final point to chew on, Dr. Seneff actually believes it’s difficult to get “too much” cholesterol in your diet, particularly in the standard American diet. But you may very well be getting too little, and that can cause problems.
Foods that are very high in cholesterol, like caviar, liver, and the adrenal glands of bears, were highly valued in some cultures that also had very low rates of heart disease and other modern diseases. Likewise, many foods that are today shunned because they are high in saturated fat, such as grass-fed beef, egg yolks, coconut oil and butter, and therefore “bad” for your cholesterol are actually among the healthiest fats you can eat!

By Dr. Mercola

Calcium is one of the most popular dietary supplements on the market, largely because of the widely circulated mantra that mega-doses of this mineral are essential for building and maintaining healthy bones.
As a result, many people believe that taking a calcium supplement is a simple way to prevent bone fractures associated with osteoporosis.
What they have not been told is that while you can force increased bone mineral density with calcium supplements, you cannot be sure that this will result in greater bone strength.
Be Careful In Interpreting Bone Tests Results

Bone density, while an excellent measurement of compressive strength, does not reveal tensile strength, i.e. whether or not your bone will resist breaking from being pulled or stretched, as commonly occurs in a fall or similar trauma.
Moreover, “osteoporosis,” as presently defined by bone scans (DXA scan) using the T-score, inappropriately defines “normal bone density” according to the standard of a 25-year old, young adult.
In other words, if you are 40, 50, or even 100, the T-score-based system says your bones are not normal, or even diseased if they are not as dense as they were when you were a young adult.
If in fact they used the age-appropriate Z-score, most cases of “osteopenia,” and many cases of “osteoporosis,” would suddenly disappear because they were inappropriately classified from the start.
Do Calcium Supplements Predispose You to Breast Cancer?

Ultimately, the “calcium is good for your bones” mantra is yet another example of a good theory gone wrong, and represents how broadly deluded the mainstream medical community is about bone health and the nature of osteoporosis, and its highly fabricated twin condition “osteopenia.” 
There are actually a number of studies indicating that mass market calcium supplements increase your risk for cardiovascular incidents and other problems, while offering little benefit to your bones. Only because something can increase your bone density: eating what amounts to chalk or pulverized bone meal, or worse, chemicals like the drugs Fosamax and Evista, does not mean this will translate into improved health for your bones, or any of your other organ systems.
Indeed, before jumping off the lemming-like cliff of conventional medical wisdom, consider there is a solid body of research indicating that higher bone density may actually increase the risk of malignant breast cancer by 300% or more! Considering that close to 1 in 4 women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lives, with breast cancer top on the list, isn’t the neurotic fixation on increasing bone density with calcium supplements misplaced, especially when it may increase the overall risk of dying from cancer and, as we will see, cardiovascular disease (the #1 killer), as well?
Calcium Can be Beneficial or Deadly Depending on Where it Ends Up in Your Body

Calcium is the most abundant mineral in your body, necessary for not only bone health but also regulating your heartbeat, conducting nerve impulses, clotting blood and stimulating hormone secretions. Your body does not make calcium, and in fact loses calcium daily through your skin, nails, hair, sweat and elimination, which is why you must replace it via your diet.
It has been estimated, however, that your body excretes as little as 100 mg a day, making the current recommendations by the National Osteoporosis Foundation for women over 50 to take 1200 mg a day, a bit troubling.  When we compare our calcium-rich diet to the traditional calcium-poor Chinese peasant diet, which was free of cow’s milk and calcium supplements, approximately 250 mg a day of plant-based calcium was all that was needed to fulfill their bodily needs – and this is a culture with no word for “osteoporosis” in its 3,000+ year old language!
The truth is that taking any calcium in excess or isolation, without complementary nutrients like magnesium, vitamin D and vitamin K2, which help keep your body in balance, can have adverse effects, such as calcium building up in coronary arteries and causing heart attacks. Even taking calcium with vitamin D does not appear to be enough to prevent these types of adverse effects.
So when you take a biologically foreign form of calcium (such as limestone, oyster shell and bone meal (hydroxylapatite), or when your body’s ability to direct calcium to the right places becomes impaired (as when you are deficient in vitamin K2), calcium may be deposited where it shouldn’t be, which can lead to multiple health problems.
Often, much of the burden of removing the excess calcium falls on the kidneys, which is why it has been proven on numerous occasions that calcium carbonate rapidly calcifies arteries in those with compromised kidney function, especially hemodialysis patients.  Calcium deposits are, in fact, major contributors and even causative factors in many conditions, including the following:

Cellulite and scar tissue
Coronary artery disease and atherosclerosis
Dental plaque and gum disease
Hypothyroidism

Obesity and diabetes
Alzheimer’s disease
Breast cancer and cysts (fibrocystic breasts)
Gallstones, colon cancer and Crohn’s disease

Kidney stones
Ovarian cysts
Cataracts, glaucoma, and macular degeneration
Bone spurs, stiff joints, osteoarthritis, tendonitis and bone cancer
Too Much Calcium May Create Mineral Deficiencies that Promote Disease

Robert Thompson, M.D. wrote a book on this subject called The Calcium Lie, which explains that bone is comprised of at least a dozen minerals, and the exclusive focus on calcium supplementation is likely to worsen bone density and actually increase your risk for osteoporosis. Dr. Thompson believes overconsumption of calcium creates other mineral deficiencies and imbalances that will increase your risk of heart disease, kidney stones, gallstones, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, obesity and type 2 diabetes.
If your calcium supplement is being turned into “little rocks” that are being deposited in your soft tissues and arteries, you can begin to understand how this could be increasing your risk for a heart attack, stroke or other health condition.
Many believe that arterial plaque is simply a buildup of cholesterol. But in reality, more than 90 percent of these fatty plaques are calcified. Cholesterol is soft and waxy and does not impair the elasticity of your arteries. But calcium deposits are like concrete, “hardening” your arteries and impairing their ability to expand. It is calcium — not cholesterol — that induces arterial stiffness and makes the plaque less stable and more prone to chipping off and subsequently inducing a life-threatening clot.
This is particularly important for postmenopausal women because hormone balance is necessary for proper calcium signaling — directing your body to deposit calcium into your bones. When hormones fall out of balance, this signaling causes calcium to slowly exit your bones and become deposited in your arteries instead. Simply taking a calcium supplement will not solve the problem because if your body cannot direct the calcium to the right spot, it will cause far more harm than good.
Why Vitamin K2 is Crucial if You Take Vitamin D and Calcium …

Vitamin K2 engages in a delicate dance with vitamin D; whereas vitamin D provides improved bone development by helping you absorb calcium, there is new evidence that vitamin K2 directs the calcium to your skeleton, while preventing it from being deposited where you don’t want it — i.e., your organs, joint spaces, and arteries. As mentioned, a large part of arterial plaque consists of calcium deposits (atherosclerosis), hence the term “hardening of the arteries.”
Vitamin K2 has also actually been found to decalcify certain tissues undergoing pathological (also known as ectopic) calcification.
Vitamin K2 activates a protein hormone called osteocalcin, produced by osteoblasts, which is needed to bind calcium into the matrix of your bone. Osteocalcin also appears to help prevent calcium from depositing into your arteries. In other words, without the help of vitamin K2, the calcium that your vitamin D so effectively lets in might be working AGAINST you — by building up your coronary arteries rather than your bones. This is why if you take calcium and vitamin D but are deficient in vitamin K, you could be worse off than if you were not taking those supplements at all.
Food is the Best Source of Calcium

In order for calcium to do your body good, it must be in a bioavailable form and balanced out with vitamins D and K and other important trace minerals, as part of a total nutritional plan.
 Good sources include raw milk and cheese from pasture-raised cows (who eat the plants), leafy green vegetables, the pith of citrus fruits, carob, sesame seeds and wheatgrass, to name a few. It’s worth mentioning that the studies done about calcium from dairy products are all done with pasteurized dairy, rather than raw dairy products that have more of their nutrients intact, and this muddies the results of these studies.
Calcium from dietary sources is typically better absorbed and utilized than calcium from supplements, which is why studies involving calcium from natural food sources have shown favorable results, including a 25 percent lower risk of dying from all causes, and a 23 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease.
You also need sources of silica and magnesium, which some researchers say is actually enzymatically “transmuted” by your body into the kind of calcium your bones can use. This theory was first put forth by French scientist Louis Kevran, a Nobel Prize nominee who spent years studying how silica, calcium, magnesium, and other minerals are related and transmutable into one another through low-energy nuclear transformation only found within living systems.
His theory explains how cows and chickens produce far more calcium in their milk and eggs than is found in their diet, or why, workers exposed to extremely high temperatures (130 degrees F) in the Middle East are known to consume salt tablets, which their bodies convert to potassium (as measured by their excreta), resulting in a reduction in their bodily temperature.
Good sources of bone-strengthening silica are cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes, and a number of herbs including horsetail, nettles, oat straw, alfalfa, and raw cacao, which is also extremely rich in highly bioavailable magnesium.
Dr. Thompson recommends the use of natural unprocessed salt as a far better alternative to calcium supplements because it provides the trace minerals you simply cannot get from food grown in today’s mineral-depleted soils. My favorite source of trace minerals is pure, unprocessed Himalayan salt, which contains 84 elements needed by your body.
The bottom line is, optimize your vitamin D levels through sun exposure and consume a variety of fresh, local organic whole foods, including vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, organic meats and eggs, unprocessed salt, and raw organic unpasteurized dairy, which will give you the bioavailable calcium your body needs along with the trace minerals and other cofactors it needs to be absorbed and properly utilized by your body.

By Dr. Mercola

Twenty-one weed species around the world are now resistant to glyphosate, up from zero in 1996 — the year Monsanto started marketing its genetically engineered Roundup Ready crops.
Glyphosate, now the world’s bestselling weed killer and the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, is emerging as one of the most dangerous Monsanto products to date, in part because super weeds are emerging at an alarming rate.
A briefing by GM Freeze noted that in the United States, the worst-affected country (which is not surprising since the U.S. also leads the world in GM crop acreage), 13 resistant weed species cover more than 11 million acres, mostly those planted with Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) soy, corn and cotton crops.
The weeds are not only making Monsanto’s promises that their GM crops would reduce pesticide use completely laughable — since farmers are being forced to use multiple, and more, pesticides to keep weeds in their GM crops under control — but also are turning out to be a very big thorn in Monsanto’s proverbial side; one that ironically might turn out to threaten the very GM crops that created them.

Investors Warned About Monsanto’s Super Weeds
As GM Freeze reported, one investment company is now advising its clients to sell Monsanto shares because of the company’s problems with weed resistance, which are arguably set to snowball even further out of control in the very near future. Monsanto’s competitors, biotech giants like Dow and Bayer CropScience, are chomping at the bit to take over where Monsanto has failed, and already have released GM seeds with tolerance to multiple herbicides designed to be used on their own or in rotation with Roundup Ready crops in a last-ditch attempt to delay resistance from developing.
(No word yet on how these companies intend to deal with the new generation of super weeds that will inevitably develop in response to the new herbicide cocktail … )
So this dark cloud’s silver lining is the fact that, with super weeds becoming an undeniable threat that can no longer be ignored, the powers that be may be forced to acknowledge that GM crops are not all they’ve been cracked up to be. And Monsanto is also being shaken to its core by the grand scope of this environmental catastrophe.
GM Freeze reported:

“Monsanto is taking the problem of the rapid development of glyphosate resistance very seriously, as it represents a threat to their main sources of income.

… Monsanto has embarked on major changes in weed management in RR crops, which still includes the use of glyphosate on its own, but also in combination with other herbicides. This is increasing herbicide usage on these crops. So instead of the promised decrease in pesticide use on GM crops, the arrival of resistant weeds has resulted in herbicide use increasing on RR crops. Analysis of USDA data has found increases in herbicide use in all the crops where RR maize, cotton and soyabeans varieties dominate.

… Previous attempts to control resistant weeds by increasing the rate at which glyphosate is applied have proved unsuccessful, yet Monsanto appears to have no intention of taking responsibility for the failure of their technology.”

GM Crops Have Failed to Deliver … and That’s an Extreme Understatement
Herbicide tolerant (Roundup Ready) GM crops were supposed to control weeds and GM Bt crops were intended to control pests. Instead of controlling weeds and pests, GM crops have led to the emergence of super weeds and super pests 
And despite claims that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) will lower the levels of chemicals (pesticides and herbicides) used, this clearly has not been the case. This is of great concern both because of the negative impacts of these chemicals on ecosystems and humans, and because there is the danger that increased chemical use will cause increasing numbers of pests and weeds to develop resistance, requiring even more chemicals in order to attempt to manage them.
According to Jeffrey Smith with the Institute for Responsible Technology, by 2004 farmers used an estimated 86 percent more herbicides on GM soy fields compared to non-GM fields. Unfortunately, Monsanto’s plan to circumvent the inevitable development of more superweeds is to douse fields with more and more chemicals.
The Institute of Science in Society reported:

“As Einstein famously quoted, ‘no problem can be solved with the same consciousness that created it.’ That is precisely what Monsanto is doing: advocating more and more herbicides to be used. New guidance published by the company to manage resistance includes:

• The use of a cocktail of pesticides including 2,4-D, prior to sowing crop seeds
• The production of GM seeds expressing tolerance to more than one pesticide. DuPont has already commercialised seeds tolerant to glyphosate and glufosinate. Monsanto has recently announced an agreement with the German pesticide and biotechnology company BASF to develop crops stacked with glyphosate and dicamba tolerant genes
• The use of herbicides that remains active in the soil, killing any seedlings as they germinate, including sulfentrozone

The consequences of increasing herbicide use are likely to put the environment and people at further risk.”

Why Glyphosate is a Health and Environmental Disaster
Glyphosate is the world’s bestselling weed killer, and it’s found in more than 30 percent of all herbicides — an extremely disturbing scenario considering the data showing it to be an immense threat to human health and the environment.
GM expert Jeffrey Smith has reported that glyphosate promotes the formation of certain types of fungi that are dangerous to people and contaminate food and animal feed. One such fungi, the Fusarium fungus, has been linked to plague epidemics, cancer, infertility and animal diseases. Residues of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide found in GM food and feed have also been linked to cell damage and death, even at very low levels. Researchers have also found it causes membrane and DNA damage, and inhibits cell respiration.
And in one animal study, rats given 1,000 mg/kg of glyphosate resulted in a 50 percent mortality rate, and skeletal alterations were observed in over 57 percent of fetuses!
Research published last year shows that glyphosate causes birth defects in frogs and chicken embryos at far lower levels than used in agricultural and garden applications.
The malformations primarily affected the:

Skull
Face
Midline and developing brain
Spinal cord

Other independent scientific research has also found that glyphosate causes:

✓ Endocrine disruption
✓ DNA damage

✓ Developmental toxicity
✓ Neurotoxicity

✓ Reproductive toxicity
✓ Cancer

✓ Liver Damage
✓ Kidney Damage

Many of these effects were apparent at much lower doses than the typical levels of pesticide residues found in food … Yet despite the evidence of widespread human exposure, which strongly suggests that the precautionary principle should be applied, regulators are turning a blind eye. 
Additionally, researchers have now linked glyphosate to Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS), a serious plant disease, in many fields around the world. Numerous studies have also shown that glyphosate is contributing not only to the huge increase in SDS, but also to the outbreak of some 40 different plant and crop diseases! It weakens plants and promotes disease in a number of ways, including:

Acting as a chelator of vital nutrients, depriving plants of the nutrients necessary for healthy plant function
Destroying beneficial soil organisms that suppress disease-causing organisms and help plants absorb nutrients
Interfering with photosynthesis, reducing water use efficiency, shortening root systems and causing plants to release sugars, which changes soil pH
Stunting and weakening plant growth

The herbicide doesn’t destroy plants directly; instead, it creates a unique “perfect storm” of conditions that activates disease-causing organisms in the soil, while at the same time wiping out plant defenses against those diseases. So the glyphosate not only weakens plants, it actually changes the makeup of the soil and boosts the number of disease-causing organisms, which is becoming a deadly recipe for crops around the globe.
On a slightly brighter note, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is finally looking into the damaging effects of glyphosate on humans and the environment and plans to make a decision regarding its future by 2015. At that time, Roundup could either continue to be used as it is now, be required to have some modifications to its use or be banned from use entirely in the United States.

How to Opt-Out of the GMO Experiment
It’s quite clear that genetically engineered foods are not only threatening the food supply with the creation of super weeds, but they can also pose potentially serious threats to animal and human health when consumed. Fortunately, now you, too, can let your opinion be heard on this issue. Several organizations, including Mercola.com, the Organic Consumers Association, the Institute for Responsible Technology, and the Environmental Working Group, are working to generate a tipping point of consumer rejection to make GMOs a thing of the past.
Here’s how you can get involved:

If you live in California and are willing to attend a short training session and then start collecting petition signatures (you will be part of a team of 2-4 people) for the California Ballot Initiative, sign up here. (For more information see: The California Ballot Initiative: Taking Down Monsanto.) Also remember to share this information with family and friends in California!
Whether you live in California or not, please donate money to this historic effort.
Talk to organic producers and stores and ask them to actively support the California Ballot. It may be the only chance we have to require the proper labeling of genetically engineered foods.
Distribute WIDELY the Non-GMO Shopping Guide to help you identify and avoid foods with GMOs. Look for products (including organic products) that feature the Non-GMO Project Verified Seal to be sure that at-risk ingredients have been tested for GMO content. You can also download the free iPhone application that is available from the iTunes store. You can find it by searching for ShopNoGMO in the applications.
For timely updates, please join the Organic Consumers Association on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter
Look for in-depth coverage of the issue at the Institute for Responsible Technology, subscribe to Spilling the Beans, and check out their Facebook or Twitter.
You can also join the Non-GMO Project on Facebook, or Twitter

In the meantime, the simplest way to avoid GM foods is to buy whole, certified organic foods. By definition, foods that are certified organic must never intentionally use GM organisms, must be produced without artificial pesticides and fertilizers and come from an animal reared without the routine use of antibiotics, growth promoters or other drugs. Additionally, grass-fed beef will not have been fed GM corn feed, although now that GM alfalfa is approved, grass-fed will not always mean GMO free.
You can also look for foods that are “non-GMO verified” by the Non-GMO Project.

By Dr. Mercola

Statins, drugs that lower your cholesterol levels, are one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world.
In the US, a staggering one in four over the age of 45 is now taking this unnecessary drug!
Statins act by blocking a crucial  enzyme in your liver responsible for making cholesterol.
But that’s not all this enzyme is responsible for.
This enzyme also makes CoQ10, which is essential for mitochondrial health.
Perhaps it’s not so surprising then that many potentially dangerous side effects go hand-in-hand with statin drug use.
To date, there are no less than 900 studies proving their adverse effects, which run the gamut from muscle problems to diabetes, to birth defects and increased cancer risk.

Statins May Increase Prostate Cancer Risk
One recent study sought to determine whether the use of statin drugs was associated with prostate cancer risk.
The researchers looked at close to 400 prostate cancer patients who had a first-time diagnosis during the period between 2005 and 2008.
They found that use of any statin drug, in any amount, was associated with a significantly increased risk for prostate cancer.
In addition, there was an increasing risk that came along with an increasing cumulative dose.
According to the study:

“The results of this case-control study suggest that statins may increase the risk of prostate cancer.”

Statins Have Been Linked to Increased Cancer Risk for More Than a Decade
While the evidence still appears a bit all over the map, with study results ranging from increased cancer risk to reduced risk, to no noticeable risk at all, what IS clear is that conventional medicine still does not understand the full ramifications of artificially lowering your cholesterol levels, and they simply don’t know whether or not the use of these drugs may be adding fuel to an already out of control cancer epidemic.
In short, with well over 30 million Americans now taking statin drugs, we’re witnessing a massive ongoing ‘live’ experiment.
Over 10 years ago, research indicated that besides lowering cholesterol, statins could also promote the growth of new blood vessels. And, although this effect may help to prevent heart attacks and other forms of heart disease, it may also promote cancer as well by increasing the growth of blood vessels in cancerous tumors. Meanwhile, other studies have indicated the complete opposite; that statins can inhibit angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels), so again, it’s virtually impossible to say that statin safety and effectiveness is based on hard science…
But the statin-cancer connection actually goes much farther back than that. A review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1996 stated:

“All members of the two most popular classes of lipid-lowering drugs (the fibrates and the statins) cause cancer in rodents, in some cases at levels of animal exposure close to those prescribed to humans. …

Longer-term clinical trials and careful postmarketing surveillance during the next several decades are needed to determine whether cholesterol-lowering drugs cause cancer in humans.

In the meantime, the results of experiments in animals and humans suggest that lipid-lowering drug treatment, especially with the fibrates and statins, should be avoided except in patients at high short-term risk of coronary heart disease.”

Cholesterol Guidelines are a Health Disaster
Needless to say, such warnings were completely ignored. Instead, public health officials have gone the opposite way, happily following the trail littered with the most cash.
Over the past decade, cholesterol guidelines have been altered to create ever more ‘patients’ to be treated with cholesterol-lowering drugs. In 2004, the U.S. government’s National Cholesterol Education Program panel advised those at risk for heart disease to attempt to reduce their LDL (bad) cholesterol to extremely low levels, and it’s been a health disaster ever since.
Before 2004, a 130-milligram LDL cholesterol level was considered healthy. The updated guidelines, however, recommended levels of less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk. These updated guidelines instantly increased the market for cholesterol-lowering drugs. The marked has further increased with the call to begin screening children prior to puberty, and prescribing statins to kids as young as eight.
Not surprisingly, eight of the nine doctors on the approval panel for these absurdly low guidelines had financial ties to the companies making these cholesterol-lowering drugs.

FDA Doesn’t “Believe” in Statin-Cancer Link
Back in 2008, troubling study findings were released showing a dramatically increased risk of cancer related deaths in those taking Inegy (also sold under the trade name Vytorin). The drug combines the widely-used statin drug simvastatin with another medication called ezetimibe, which blocks the absorption of cholesterol in your gut. The study also found no benefit whatsoever from the drug.
This despite the fact that it reduced LDL cholesterol levels by a respectable 61 percent, which “should have” had an effect on cardiovascular events, based on the prevailing hypothesis that high LDL equates to high risk of heart disease. So, in a nutshell, the drug had no beneficial impact on the primary outcome (meaning it did not reduce major cardiovascular adverse events), while more people developed cancer on the treatment (105 versus 70 patients taking a placebo), and more cancer related deaths (39 cancer deaths versus 23 in the control group).
A couple of months after the results were revealed, a panel assembled by the American Academy of Cardiology declared that:

“… the aggressively marketed drug combination should be used only as a last resort. There is currently no evidence that ezetimibe, which reduces levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, improves clinical outcomes such as myocardial infarction or death.”

In December 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the completion of their review of the disturbing SEAS trial (above), as well as interim data from two other large-scale ongoing cardiovascular trials using Vytorin: the SHARP and IMPROVE-IT trials. (The SHARP trial was concluded in 2010, while the IMPROVE-IT trial is expected to be completed in 2012.)
Their conclusion?

“FDA believes it is unlikely that Vytorin or Zetia increase the risk of cancer or cancer-related death.”

I don’t know how much faith you have in the FDA’s beliefs, but mine is on pretty shaky ground… The FDA goes on to list a number of factors that were weighed to reach the conclusion that they believe cancer is unrelated to the drugs. You can review them for yourself here, and see if you would concur with their assessment.

Statins May Increase Your Risk of Heart Disease
Ironically, while reducing your risk of cardiovascular events and heart disease is the primary motivation for prescribing statins, these drugs can actually increase your risk of heart disease because they deplete your body of Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which can lead to heart failure.  Statins have also been linked to:

✓ Weakness
✓ Serious degenerative muscle tissue condition (rhabdomyolysis)
✓ Pancreas or liver dysfunction, including a potential increase in liver enzymes

✓ Muscle problems, aches and pains
✓ Diabetes
✓ Polyneuropathy (nerve damage in the hands and feet)

✓ Immune system suppression
✓ Increased risk of food borne illness
✓ Anemia

✓ Sexual dysfunction (erectile dysfunction)
✓ Cataracts
✓ Cognitive impairment, including memory loss and transient global amnesia

The Importance of CoQ10 or, if You’re Over 40, Ubiquinol
As mentioned in the beginning, statin drugs also block the production of Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), and that in and of itself poses a very serious health risk. As your body gets more and more depleted of CoQ10, you may suffer from fatigue, muscle weakness and soreness, and eventually heart failure. Coenzyme Q10 plays a vital role in the process of neutralizing free radicals and the optimal production of cellular energy.
Unfortunately, the majority of people who take statins are unaware of their need for CoQ10, and physicians rarely advise their patients to take this supplement along with their statin—at least in the United States. It’s also important to supplement right from the start, to ward off irreversible mitochondrial damage.
Make no mistake about it, if you’re on a statin drug, you simply must take a CoQ10 supplement. If you’re over the age of 40, I strongly recommend using the reduced version, called ubiquinol. Ubiquinol is a far more effective form—I personally take it every day as it has far-ranging health benefits. There’s evidence that CoQ10/ubiquinol is beneficial for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and even cancer, as well as staving off premature aging in general by preventing telomere shortening, which can slow or potentially even reverse the aging process.
Unlike prescription drugs that kill over 125,000 people every year in the U.S. alone, there are no reported side effects of CoQ10 supplementation and no one has ever died from taking it.

What Drug Companies Don’t Want You to Know About LDL
While statins drugs are very effective for lowering so-called “bad” cholesterol, the low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, it’s important to realize that there are different sizes of LDL cholesterol particles, and it’s the LDL particle size that is relevant, as small particles get stuck easily and causes more inflammation. Unfortunately, most people don’t hear about that part, and very rarely, if ever, get it tested.
Naturally, the drug companies really don’t want you to know about this, because statins do not modulate the size of the particles.
The only way to make sure your LDL particles are large enough to not get stuck and cause inflammation and damage is through your diet. In fact, modulating LDL particle size is one of the things that insulin does. If you eat properly and maintain normal insulin levels, then everything works as it should—the LDL particles are large and buoyant; they don’t get stuck, and don’t cause inflammation.
So rather than worry about your cholesterol numbers, you really want to work on reducing inflammation, which can be caused by numerous things, including:

Oxidized cholesterol (cholesterol that has gone rancid, such as that from overcooked, scrambled eggs)
Eating lots of sugar and grains
Eating foods cooked at high temperatures
Eating trans fats
A sedentary lifestyle
Smoking
Emotional stress

When you get to the bottom of it, the real “villain” of heart disease is typically an unhealthy lifestyle, characterized by a heavy reliance on sugars and grains, processed, highly cooked foods, and insufficient amounts of exercise – not “high cholesterol” per se.
For more information about cholesterol and how to properly evaluate your heart disease risk, please see my detailed special report on cholesterol.

By Dr. Mercola

In Europe genetically modified foods and ingredients have to be labeled.
In the United States, they do not.
But the truth is, if and when GM labeling is finally required in the United States, you’re going to see changes to the majority of food labels in your supermarket, as GM foods already widely appear in our food supply.
Most people are not aware that nearly EVERY processed food you encounter at your local supermarket that does not bear the “USDA Organic” label is filled with GM components.
This is due to the amount of GM crops now grown in the United States (over 90 percent of all corn is GM corn and over 95 percent all soy is GM soy).
As you might suspect, it’s in the interest of the industry to keep the prevalence of GM ingredients quiet and they won’t go down without a fight.

Biotech Industry Spends More Than Half a Billion to Influence Congress
In just over a decade, the food and agriculture biotechnology industry has spent more than $572 million in campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures, according to an analysis by Food & Water Watch.
Key among the goals of this intense lobbying effort is to prevent GM food labeling and keep Americans in the dark about the contents of their food.
The analysis states:

“The food and agriculture biotechnology industry has been flexing its financial political muscle to ease the regulatory oversight of genetically modified foods. Lobbying efforts for some of these firms and groups have included approval of cloned food and genetically engineered food, animals and livestock.

Companies are also fighting to eliminate or prevent labeling on genetically modified foods in the United States and preventing other countries from regulating genetically modified foods. These efforts have dovetailed with lobbying to tighten intellectual property law protections over patented seeds and animals in attempts to further benefit the biotech industry.”

Over 95 percent of Americans polled said they think GM foods should require a label, stating it’s an ethical issue and consumers should be able to make an informed choice. Like people in Europe, Americans are suspicious of GM foods, and a large part of why many continue to buy them is because they are unaware that they’re already in the food. A prominent GM food label would be a death sentence to U.S. GM crops, which are right now enjoying a free for all when it comes to entering the food market.
As Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association stated:

“Why are there basically no genetically engineered foods or crops anywhere in Europe, while 75 percent of U.S. supermarket foods—including many so-called “natural” foods—are GE tainted?

The answer is simple. In Europe genetically modified foods and ingredients have to be labeled. In the U.S. they do not. Up until now, in North America, Monsanto and the Biotechnocrats have enjoyed free reign to secretly lace non-organic foods with gene-spliced viruses, bacteria, antibiotic-resistant marker genes, and foreign DNA—mutant “Frankenfoods” shown to severely damage the health of animals, plants, and other living organisms in numerous scientific studies.

Monsanto and their allies understand the threat that truth-in-labeling poses for GMOs.

As soon as genetically modified foods start to be labeled in the U.S., millions of consumers will start to read these labels and react.

They’ll complain to grocery store managers and companies, they’ll talk to their family and friends. They’ll start switching to foods that are organic or at least GMO-free. Once enough consumers start complaining about GM foods and food ingredients; stores will eventually stop selling them; and farmers will stop planting them.

Genetically engineered foods have absolutely no benefit for consumers or the environment, only hazards. This is why Monsanto and their friends in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations have prevented consumer GMO truth-in-labeling laws from ever getting a public discussion, much less coming to a vote in Congress.”

Why the Approval of GM Alfalfa Could Mean the End of Organic
Industry lobbying is clearly working, as to date biotech companies have evaded mandatory labeling laws (although a new California initiative may change all of that). They also succeeded in getting GM alfalfa approved, which quite literally threatens the entire organic industry, including organic meat, as alfalfa is the fourth largest crop in the U.S., and is used to produce forage seed and hay to feed cows and other livestock.
Contamination would be disastrous for organic dairy- and cattle farmers as federal organic standards forbid them from using GM crops, and organic food manufacturers will reject a food ingredient if found to be contaminated with GM material — not to mention Monsanto’s history of suing both conventional and organic farmers for patent infringement should their crops be cross-contaminated.

Download Interview Transcript

Cummins noted in the above  interview that any alfalfa growing within a five-mile radius of GM alfalfa will immediately become contaminated, and it’s clearly evident that GM crops of all kinds cannot be contained. They absolutely WILL contaminate their conventional and organic counterparts, which will mean ultimately the entire food supply will contain GMOs.
Some, like Dr. Philip Bereano, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and an engaged activist concerning GM foods, believe contamination is actually an intentional strategy by both the government and the industry to weaken the organic industry to simply allow GM animal feed in organics. 
Indeed, while USDA chief Tom Vilsack acknowledged alfalfa contamination concerns in an “Open Letter to Stakeholders” on December 30, 2010, stating that the USDA’s environmental impact statement “acknowledges the potential of cross-fertilization to non-GE alfalfa from GE alfalfa,” adding that cross-fertilization is “a significant concern for farmers who produce for non-GE markets at home and abroad,” steps were not taken to address them.

Congress is the Puppet, Biotech is the Puppeteer

It takes only a flick of biotech’s wrist to move Congress’ regulatory arms, and the truth is the revolving door between the two is spinning so fast that the line between industry lobbyists and legislators is permanently blurred.
As the Food & Water Watch report noted:

“At least a baker’s dozen of former members of Congress represent food and agriculture biotechnology interests as lobbyists. Of the companies surveyed, seven spent over $8.5 million to hire the firms of at least 13 former senators and representatives to represent these biotechnology interests to their former colleagues in the Congress. Many of these former legislators-turned-lobbyists have formidable legislative pedigrees.

For example, Former House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Charles Stenholm (D-TX) is currently a registered lobbyist for Syngenta, a seller of genetically modified plants in the United States and abroad.”

Biotech giant Monsanto is a prime example of how the industry has infiltrated U.S. regulatory agencies like the FDA and the USDA with their previous employees who are still very loyal to Monsanto. Cummins pointed out the following connections as a start:

Clarence Thomas, who did not withdraw himself from a Supreme Court decision on genetically engineered alfalfa last year, used to be the general counsel for Monsanto.
Michael Taylor, who was formerly the vice president of Monsanto, is now the Food and Drug Administration Deputy Commissioner for Foods.
Roger Beachy, the former director of the Monsanto-funded Danforth Plant Science Center in Saint Louis, is now the director of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Islam Siddiqui was vice president of Monsanto and Dupont’s funded pesticide-promotion group CropLife. He is now the agricultural negotiator for the U.S. Trade Representative. In other words, he is the enforcer for U.S. foreign policy that countries have to accept our genetically engineered exports.
Rajiv Shah is the former Agricultural Development Director for the pro-biotech Gates Foundation, who are frequently partnering with Monsanto. He served as Obama’s USDA undersecretary for Research, Education and Economics.
Elena Kagan has served as President Obama’s Solicitor General. She took Monsanto’s side against organic farmers on the roundup ready alfalfa case.
Ramona Ramiro, corporate counsel to Dupont, another biotech bully, has been nominated by President Obama to serve as general counsel for the USDA.

This is not an issue of Republican versus Democrat. As Cummins noted, both parties are guilty:

“We must point that it’s not just the Obama Administration that has served as a revolving door for Monsanto. We saw the same situation under Bush Jr., Clinton and Bush Sr. We have a corporation Monsanto that is not only out of control, but that places its people in high positions; that donates large sums of money to members of congress; and that basically gets its way every time there is a policy decision made in Washington.”

It should not come as a surprise, then, that even the current secretary of the USDA, Tom Vilsack, is thoroughly entrenched in the industry. As the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) pointed out:

Vilsack has been a strong supporter of genetically engineered crops, including bio-pharmaceutical corn.
The biggest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Biotech Governor of the Year. He was also the founder and former chair of the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership.
When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child of economic development potential was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning dairy cows.
The undemocratic and highly unpopular 2005 seed pre-emption bill was Vilsack’s brainchild. The law strips local government’s right to regulate genetically engineered seed (including where GE can be grown, maintaining GE-free buffers or banning GE corn locally).
Vilsack is an ardent supporter of corn and soy-based biofuels, which use as much or more fossil fuel energy to produce them as they generate, while driving up world food prices and literally starving the poor.
Overall, Vilsack’s record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and promoting animal cloning.

I think this makes it a lot easier to understand why GM crops have proliferated the American landscape and food supply, despite public outcry and organized opposition.

GM Crops Failing Miserably, Threatening Public Health
Virtually all of the claims of benefit of GM crops – increased yields, more food production, controlled pests and weeds, reductions in chemical use in agriculture, drought-tolerant seeds – have not materialized. The Global Citizens’ Report on the State of GMOs states:

Contrary to the claim of feeding the world, genetic engineering has not increased the yield of a single crop.
Herbicide tolerant (Roundup Ready) crops were supposed to control weeds and Bt crops were intended to control pests. Instead of controlling weeds and pests, GE crops have led to the emergence of super weeds and super pests … Herbicide resistant crops such as Roundup Ready cotton can create the risk of herbicide resistant “superweeds” by transferring the herbicide resistance to weeds.
Despite claims that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) will lower the levels of chemicals (pesticides and herbicides) used, this has not been the case. This is of great concern both because of the negative impacts of these chemicals on ecosystems and humans, and because there is the danger that increased chemical use will cause pests and weeds to develop resistance, requiring even more chemicals in order to manage them.
Monsanto has been claiming that through genetic engineering it can breed crops for drought tolerance and other climate-resilient traits. This is a false promise.
Among the false claims made by Monsanto and the Biotechnology industry is that GE foods are safe. However, there are enough independent studies to show that GE foods can cause health damage.

At the same time, earlier this year, Cry1Ab, a specific type of Bt toxin from certain GM crops, has for the first time been detected in human and fetal blood samples. It appears the toxin is quite prevalent, as upon testing 69 pregnant and non-pregnant women who were eating a typical Canadian diet (which included foods such as GM soy, corn and potatoes), researchers found Bt toxin in:

93 percent of blood samples of pregnant women
80 percent of fetal blood samples
69 percent of non-pregnant women blood samples

There’s now plenty of evidence that the Bt toxin may trigger an inflammatory response, and as you may know, chronic inflammation is at the root of many increasingly common diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease. Food allergies are also skyrocketing, as is infertility, which could also be a potential side effect of GM foods, based on results from animal studies. Monsanto insists that GM foods are no different from conventionally grown varieties, but the research does NOT support this claim. Here is just a sampling of the unsavory findings associated with GM foods:

✓
GM pea protein caused lung damage in mice

✓
Offspring of rats fed GM soy showed a five-fold increase in mortality, lower birth weights, and the inability to reproduce

✓
GM potatoes may cause cancer in rats

✓
Male mice fed GM soy had damaged young sperm cells

✓
Bacteria in your gut can take up DNA from GM food

✓
The embryo offspring of GM soy-fed mice had altered DNA functioning

✓
GM foods lead to significant organ disruptions in rats and mice, specifically the kidney, liver, heart and spleen

✓
Several US farmers reported sterility or fertility problems among pigs and cows fed on GM corn varieties

✓
Bt corn caused a wide variety of immune responses in mice, commonly associated with diseases such as arthritis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, osteoporosis, and inflammatory bowel disease

✓
Investigators in India have documented fertility problems, abortions, premature births, and other serious health issues, including deaths, among buffaloes fed GM cottonseed products

The Time is Ripe to Fight Back
All is not lost on the GM food front, as we now have a practical plan to end this disaster. By educating the public about the risks of GM foods through a massive education campaign, and launching a ballot initiative in California for 2012, which will require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods and food ingredients, our plan is to generate a tipping point of consumer rejection to make GMOs a thing of the past.
Several organizations, including Mercola.com, the Organic Consumers Association, the Institute for Responsible Technology, and even the Environmental Working Group are getting actively involved. But we do need your help.
Here’s how you can get involved:

If you live in California and are willing to attend a short training session and then start collecting petition signatures (you will be part of a team of 2-4 people) in early November for the California Ballot Initiative, sign up here. (For more information see: The California Ballot Initiative: Taking Down Monsanto.) Also remember to share this information with family and friends in California!
Whether you live in California or not, please donate money to this historic effort
Talk to organic producers and stores and ask them to actively support the California Ballot. It may be the only chance we have to have to label genetically engineered foods.
Distribute WIDELY the Non-GMO Shopping Guide to help you identify and avoid foods with GMOs. Look for products (including organic products) that feature the Non-GMO Project Verified Seal to be sure that at-risk ingredients have been tested for GMO content. You can also download the free iPhone application that is available in the iTunes store. You can find it by searching for ShopNoGMO in the applications.
For timely updates, please join the Organic Consumers Association on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter.
You can also join the Non-GMO Project on Facebook, or Twitter

In the meantime, the simplest way to avoid GM foods is to buy whole, certified organic foods. By definition, foods that are certified organic must never intentionally use GM organisms, produced without artificial pesticides and fertilizers and from an animal reared without the routine use of antibiotics, growth promoters or other drugs. Additionally, grass-fed beef will not have been fed GM corn feed.
You can also look for foods that are “non-GMO verified” by the Non-GMO Project.

By Dr. Mercola

Organic foods are required by U.S. federal law to be produced in ways that promote ecological sustainability, without common toxic and genetically engineered ingredients. 
But organic products are increasingly being forced to compete with products that are labeled as “natural.”
There are no restrictions on the term “natural”, and it often constitutes nothing more than meaningless marketing hype.
According to a recent report from the Cornucopia Institute:

“[There is a] vast differences between organic cereal and granola products and so-called natural products, which contain ingredients grown on conventional farms where the use of toxic pesticides and genetically engineered organisms is widespread.

… Our analysis reveals that “natural” products—using conventional ingredients—often are priced higher than equivalent organic products.

This suggests that some companies are taking advantage of consumer confusion.”

This is significant, because surveys have shown that more consumers pay attention to the “100% Natural” claim than the “100% Organic” label. In one such survey, 31 percent of respondents said the “100% Natural” label was the most desirable eco-friendly product claim, compared to just 14 percent who chose “100% Organic.” Food companies clearly know this, and they’re cashing in on your confusion.

Are You Being Misled by Your Favorite “All-Natural” Brand?
According to the Cornucopia report:

“Since breakfast cereals are popular with children, it is especially important for parents to be aware of the differences between “natural” products, with conventional ingredients, and certified organic ones. Children are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of synthetic pesticides and other inputs that are commonly used in “natural” products but prohibited in organics.”

Indeed, it’s not enough to be an avid label reader these days, you also have to know how the “labeling game” is being played by the food manufacturers. The average shopper would probably agree that the term “natural” evokes the idea that the food in question will not contain any added synthetic ingredients or chemicals, but because there is no standard definition of the term, with the exception of meat, “natural” in many cases equates to “conventional.”
The misuse of the term “natural” by companies who simply pay lip service to sustainability and the organic movement undermines companies that are sincere in their efforts to bring you eco-friendly, unadulterated, safe foods.
The Cornucopia report clearly shows that the terms “natural” and “organic” are not interchangeable, and as a concerned shopper, you need to beware of the differences between the two, or risk paying more for what amounts to little more than a conventional product.
The report also unveils the real owners of many of your all-natural brands—a piece of information that is oftentimes not disclosed anywhere on the packaging, or even on the product’s website—which might give you a hint that the product may be produced in less than organic ways. For example, both Kashi and Bear Naked are actually owned by Kellogg Company… Synthetic ingredients and additives, toxic pesticides, fumigants and solvents frequently show up in products bearing the “natural” label, while these are strictly prohibited in organic production.
According to the report:

“On August 31, 2011, a class action lawsuit was filed against Kellogg/Kashi® for allegedly misleading consumers with its “natural” claims. One Kashi® product in particular, GoLean® Shakes, is composed almost entirely of synthetic and unnaturally processed ingredients, according to the plaintiff.”

What You Need to Know About Organic Labels
It’s important to realize that there are several different organic labels out there, but only one relates directly to foods: the USDA Organic seal. This seal is your best assurance of organic quality. Growers and manufacturers of organic products bearing the USDA seal have to meet the strictest standards of any of the currently available organic labels.

Products labeled “100% Organic” must contain only organically produced ingredients
Products labeled “Certified Organic” must contain at least 95 percent organic ingredients
The label “Made with Organic Ingredients” can contain anywhere between 70 to 95 percent organic ingredients

In order to ensure you’re actually getting your money’s worth, you need to make sure the food you buy bears the “100% USDA Organic” label.  The problem with the latter two labels is obvious. Anywhere from five to 30 percent of the ingredients may be conventionally-grown, so you’re still exposed to pesticide residues and other questionable ingredients. The “Made with Organic Ingredients” is often misused and misleading, just as the “natural” label, as it allows for plenty of conventionally-produced ingredients.
A “100% Organic” product on the other hand cannot be irradiated, and cannot contain preservatives or flavor enhancing chemicals, nor traces of heavy metals or other contaminants in excess of tolerances set by the FDA.
It must also be grown and processed using organic farming methods that recycle resources and promote biodiversity—so it encompasses organic in a holistic way, from start to finish. Crops must be grown without synthetic pesticides, bioengineered genes, petroleum-based fertilizers, or sewage sludge-based fertilizers, and livestock cannot be given growth hormones.
So, in terms of organic food, there’s really only one label that can provide you with any real measure of quality, and that’s the “100% USDA Organic” label. As the Cornucopia report clearly shows, the “natural” label can be close to worthless in terms of protecting you from harmful ingredients and informing you about the manner in which it was grown.

Bait and Switch…

The Cornucopia report also brings up the problem of bait and switch:

“Some companies that started out organic, and built consumer loyalty as organic brands, have switched to non-organic “natural” ingredients and labeling. Peace Cereal® is an example of “bait-and switch.”

In 2008, the company that owned the Peace Cereal® brand, Golden Temple, switched from organic to cheaper conventional ingredients, without lowering its prices. At the time of the switch, the company also did not change its package design, other than eliminating the USDA Organic seal and the word “organic” from its cereal boxes. Most egregiously, it did not change the barcode on the cereal boxes. Many retailers and shoppers were unaware of the switch until the Cornucopia Institute conducted an investigation in late 2010…

Today, Peace Cereal® is owned by Hearthside Food Solutions, which changed its logo to include “All Natural,” appearing right below the “Peace Cereal®” name. Hearthside/Peace Cereal® continues to charge customers as much as or more than many certified organic competitors.”

According to the report, other companies that performed similar bait and switch maneuvers include Annie’s Homegrown and Barbara’s Bakery. Cereal and granola companies that started out organic, and remain faithful to the organic label include:

Food for Life
Grandy Oats
Nature’s Path

Interestingly enough, when comparing wholesale prices for multigrain and specialty grain flakes, the two least expensive products are by committed organic companies, effectively shattering the myth that organic has to be more expensive than conventional. In other price comparisons, “natural” brands using conventionally-grown ingredients were priced exactly the same as 100 percent organic companies.

“Natural” Label Does NOT Prohibit Genetically Modified Ingredients
The USDA certified organic label is your best guarantee that the food was produced without:

Toxic pesticides
Genetically engineered (GM) ingredients
Carcinogenic fumigants
Chemical solvents

This peace of mind is something the “100% Natural” label will NOT give you. Genetically modified (GM) ingredients are of particular concern when it comes to food products like breakfast cereals and granola bars, because, in the US, the vast majority of the most common ingredients in these products—corn, soy, and canola—are genetically modified.
Unfortunately, more than 60 percent of consumers erroneously believe that the “natural” label implies or suggests the absence of GM ingredients, according to a 2010 Hartman Group poll. If you’re one of the 60 percent, please understand that at the current time, the ONLY label that can protect you against GM ingredients is the USDA 100% Organic label.

Shocking Finding: Many Natural Brands Contain up to 100 Percent GM Ingredients!
The most disturbing finding presented in the featured report relates to GM ingredients found in so-called all-natural foods:

“The Cornucopia Institute sent samples of breakfast cereal to an accredited and highly reputable GMO testing laboratory. Samples were tested for the exact percentage of genetically engineered corn or soybeans, using the most sophisticated and accurate tests commercially available.

The results were stunning. Several breakfast cereal manufacturers that market their foods as “natural,” even some that claim to avoid genetically engineered ingredients and are enrolled in the Non-GMO Project, contained high levels of genetically engineered ingredients.”

Natural products that contained 100 percent genetically modified grains included:

✓ Kashi®
✓ Mother’s®
✓ Nutritious Living®
✓ General Mills Kix®

✓ GoLean®
✓ Bumpers®
✓ Hi-Lo®

Two breakfast cereal products that are currently enrolled in the Non-GMO Project, Barbara’s Bakery’s Puffins and Whole Foods’ 365® Corn Flakes, contained more than 50 percent GM corn…   Meanwhile, the control, Nature’s Path® USDA certified organic corn flakes, contained only trace amounts of GM contamination (less than 0.5 percent).
Cornucopia writes:

“These test results underscore the importance of the organic label, which ensures consumers that the manufacturer uses only non-genetically engineered ingredients. More extensive testing is necessary to draw conclusions regarding the truthfulness of “non-GMO” claims, but these preliminary results point to several problems. First, manufacturers can claim that they avoid purchasing genetically engineered ingredients, but these claims may be meaningless unless they are verified by a third party, such as an organic certifying agent.

In addition, many of the most reputable organic companies have developed their own testing protocols to ensure the purity of their products. Furthermore, the Non-GMO Project, which “enrolls” products before it verifies them as being non-GMO, may give consumers a false sense of security. Our test results reveal that several “enrolled” products were in fact made with GE ingredients.”

How to Find Healthy Food—100 Percent Organic or Not
As deplorable as this situation is, it’s not surprising. Food companies, as any other primarily profit-driven company, simply cannot let such a swelling market niche go untapped. However, if you realize that much of the all-natural claims are hype, it becomes easier to navigate around the deception.
To find brands that are committed to sustainable organic agriculture and avoiding genetically engineered ingredients use Cornucopia’s Cereal Scorecard.
Another factor to consider is the fact that many small family farms actually adhere to fully organic practices even though they may not have gone through the expense of obtaining organic certification. So labels aren’t everything when it comes to healthful food. But if you’re going to shop by the label, make sure it’s the USDA certified 100% organic label.  Aside from that, to find the freshest, healthiest foods out there, here are a few other guidelines to live by:

Frequent farmer’s markets where you can find fresh locally-grown foods that are in season
Join a community-supported agriculture program if one is available near you (it allows you to buy produce, meats and other foods directly from the farm)
Take part in organic food co-ops in your area
Plant an organic garden; even a small space can produce a lot of fresh food and herbs
If you must shop in a supermarket, look for locally grown items, which are likely to be fresher than other foods

URGENT Action Items!
The Cornucopia Institute is now in URGENT need of your help, and joining the Institute and/or signing up for their newsletter will assure you get timely updates on these important issues.
At the end of November, the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) will vote on a number of important issues with regards to organics, including:

1. The approval of an organic egg regulation that would require organic chicken farmers to provide a mere two square feet per bird of outdoor space. This is a huge favor to industrial producers allowing their factory farmed eggs to fall under the designation of “organic.” Meanwhile, it will handicap family farms that are truly letting their birds out to pasture.
2. A vote will take place to decide whether to allow a food additive produced by Martek Biosciences in organic foods. The product is an omega 3/omega-6 oil synthesized from fermented algae and soil fungus. The oil is extracted from this biomass using hexane, a neurotoxic byproduct of gasoline refinement that is specifically banned in organics.
Cornucopia investigated Martek’s patent and safety filings at the FDA, and discovered that the product also contains synthetic chemicals, stabilizers, carriers, and some of the ingredients are also genetically modified. (As it turns out, some of their products were developed by Monsanto before Martek bought the technical rights.)
“They’ve already added this to almost all infant formula in the United States,” Kastel warns. “Algae and fungus have never been a part of the human diet, let alone children’s. And now we see it in organic infant formula, and companies like Dean Foods are adding it to organic milk… it’s in every single formula available on the market… except for one organic brand [Babies Only brand, which contains DHA from eggs. All other organic brands appear to contain Martek’s omega oil].
3. The NOSB is also considering approving the addition of sulfites (artificial preservatives) to organic wine.  This would be the first time artificial preservatives are allowed in organics

Organics has never been under such dire threats, so I urge you to please take a moment right now to print out, sign, and mail the proxy letter provided by Cornucopia back to them ASAP for hand delivery at the rapidly approaching NOSB meeting.
Corporate lobbyists will be present, and so will the Cornucopia Institute, to counter their claims and make sure your voice, in support of organic integrity, is heard.
So, please, print out this proxy letter right now. Sign it, and mail it, as soon as possible, to:

The Cornucopia Institute
PO Box 126
Cornucopia, Wisconsin 54827

Also consider including a donation check with your letter, to support the invaluable work the Cornucopia Institute performs to protect your and your family’s right to clean, wholesome, truly organic food.
As of right now, there does not appear to be any additional benefit to contacting your congressman, but if the need arises, Cornucopia will notify all their members and subscribers with the information.
I can’t encourage you enough to participate in this process. It’s important to recognize that you CAN make a difference! Always remember that collectively, we have the most effective power in the marketplace that can exceed the power of these multibillion dollar, multinational corporations. We can vote with our pocket books. But we also need to make our voices heard; we have to let these agencies know that we are watching, we’re paying attention, and we’re not going to allow this immoral, if not downright illegal, industrial favoritism to continue.

Congratulations! You have made some great changes to your life. The last step will be to implement a juicing plan. I am firmly convinced that the benefits of juicing are the keys to giving you a radiant, energetic life, and truly optimal health.
I’ve said this in the other levels of this nutrition plan, but it’s so important I’ll say it again – valuable and sensitive micronutrients become damaged when you heat foods.
Cooking and processing food destroys these micronutrients by altering their shape and chemical composition. In this advanced nutritional level, you avoid all processed foods and eat only organic vegetables and fruits, unless not otherwise possible.
Virtually every health authority recommends that we get 6-8 servings of vegetables and fruits per day and very few of us actually get that. Juicing is an easy way to virtually guarantee that you will reach your daily target for vegetables.
While you can certainly juice fruits, if you are overweight, have high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol, it is best to limit using fruits until you normalize these conditions.
The exception would be lemons and limes which have virtually none of the offending sugar, fructose, that causes most of the metabolic complications. Additionally lemons or limes are amazing at eliminating the bitter taste of the dark, deep green leafy vegetables that provide most of the benefits of juicing.
Benefits of Juicing

There are three main reasons why you will want to consider incorporating vegetable juicing into your optimal health program:

Juicing helps you absorb all the nutrients from the vegetables. This is important because most of us have impaired digestion as a
result of making less-than-optimal food choices over many years. This
limits your body’s ability to absorb all the nutrients from the
vegetables. Juicing will help to “pre-digest” them for you, so you
will receive most of the nutrition, rather than having it go down the
toilet.
Juicing allows you to consume an optimal amount of vegetables in an efficient manner. If you are a carb type, you should eat one pound of raw vegetables
per 50 pounds of body weight per day. Some people may find eating that
many vegetables difficult, but it can be easily accomplished with a
quick glass of vegetable juice.
You can add a wider variety of vegetables in your diet. Many
people eat the same vegetable salads every day. This violates the
principle of regular food rotation and increases your chance of
developing an allergy to a certain food. But with juicing, you can
juice a wide variety of vegetables that you may not normally enjoy
eating whole.

If you are new to juicing, I recommend a mid-priced juicer. The
cheap centrifugal juicers (like the Juiceman) break easily, produce
low-quality juice, and are very loud, which may contribute to hearing
loss. They also don’t last very long.
My favorite are the single gear juicers which are relatively fast,
less expensive and easier to clean than more expensive juicers like
twin gears or even the $2000 Norwalk juicers. Here is my current
favorite juicer. Many people initially think that juicing will be a real chore, but
the majority are pleasantly surprised to find that it is much easier
than they thought it would be.

Vegetable Juice is Not a Complete Meal

It is important to note that vegetable juice has very little protein
and virtually no fat, so by itself, it is not really a complete food. It
really should be used in addition to your regular meals not in place
of it.
So unless you are undergoing some special fasting or detoxification
program, it is probably unwise to use juicing as a meal replacement.
Ideally, it can be consumed with your meal or as a between meal snack.

Important to Listen to Your Body

This is partly because you should only start by juicing vegetables that you enjoy eating non-juiced. The juice should taste pleasant — not make you feel nauseous.
It is very important to listen to your body when juicing. Your
stomach should feel good all morning long. If it is churning or
growling or generally making its presence known, you probably juiced
something you should not be eating. Personally, I’ve noticed that I
can’t juice large amounts of cabbage, but if I spread it out, I do
fine.

Here are a few simple lessons to get you up and help you enjoy the benefits of juicing quickly:

The health benefits of juicing are immense for adults and children.

Lesson 1: Use pesticide free veggies.

It is wise to choose organic whenever possible. However, some
vegetables are worse than others. Below are the vegetables that are the
most pesticide-loaded ones according to the Environmental Working Group.
So it would be wise to only purchase these vegetables if they are organically grown. The worst ones are listed first.

Celery
Spinach
Kale
Collard Greens
Lettuce
Carrots
Cucumber (not as bad if you peel the skin)

Lesson 2: Get ready to juice!

Please note that the order listed below is only intended for those
that are new to juicing so you do have a pleasant experience with it.
However, if you use ¼ to ½ lemon or lime, you can start
experimenting with the more bitter greens early on as the lemon and
lime effectively counter their bitterness.
Please note that it would be FAR better to use lemon or limes than
carrots, beets or apples, which have far more fructose than lemons or
limes.
Step 1: If you are new to juicing, I recommend starting out with these vegetables, as they are the easiest to digest and tolerate:

Celery
Fennel (anise)
Cucumbers

These three aren’t as nutrient dense as the dark green leafy vegetables In the few days to weeks it takes you to adjust to the 3 vegetables listed above, you can start adding the more nutritionally valuable but less palatable vegetables into your juice.
Step 2: When you’ve acclimatized yourself to juicing, you can start adding these vegetables:

Red leaf lettuce
Green leaf lettuce
Romaine lettuce
Endive
Escarole
Spinach

An interesting side note: Cabbage juice is one of the most healing
nutrients for ulcer repair as it is a huge source of vitamin U.
Step 3: When you’re ready, move on to adding herbs
to your juicing. Herbs also make wonderful combinations, and here are
two that work exceptionally well:

Parsley
Cilantro

You need to be cautious with cilantro, as many cannot tolerate it well.So start off with a few sprigs and work your way up from there. You can use a few tablespoons if you have no side effects and enjoy the taste. If you are new to juicing, hold off on the cilantro. Herbs are more challenging to consume, but they are highly beneficial.
Step 4: The last step.The greens listed below are bitter:so start with smaller leaves at a time and be sure and balance it out with lime or lemon.

Kale
Collard Greens
Dandelion Greens
Mustard Greens (bitter)

When purchasing collard greens, find a store that sells the leaves
still attached to the main stalk. If they are cut off, the vegetable
rapidly loses many of its valuable nutrients.

Lesson 3: Make your juice taste great.

If you would like to make your juice taste a bit more palatable, especially in the beginning, you can add these elements:

Lemons and Limes: You can also add one half to a whole lime or lemon for every quart of juice. You can actually juice the skin if you want to avoid the hassle of peeling them
Cranberries: You can also add some cranberries if
you enjoy them. Researchers have discovered that cranberries have
five times the antioxidant content of broccoli, which means they may
protect against cancer, stroke and heart disease. In addition, they
are chock-full of phytonutrients, and can help women avoid urinary
tract infections. Limit the cranberries to about 4 ounces per pint of
juice.
Fresh ginger: This is an excellent addition if
you enjoy the taste. It gives your juice a little “kick”! And, as an
added boon, researchers have found that ginger can have dramatic
effects on cardiovascular health, including preventing
atherosclerosis, lowering cholesterol levels, and preventing the
oxidation of low density lipoprotein (LDL).

Lesson 4: Drink your vegetable juice right away, or store it very carefully.

Juicing is a time-consuming process, so you’ll probably be thinking
to yourself, “I wonder if I can juice first thing in the morning, and
then drink it later?” This is not a good idea. Vegetable juice is
HIGHLY perishable so it’s best to drink all of your juice immediately. However, if you’re careful, you can store it for up to 24 hours
with only moderate nutritional decline. This is really helpful if you
are bringing your juice to work with you so you can consume it during
the day. How to store your juice:

Put your juice in a glass jar with an airtight lid and fill it
to the very top. There should be a minimum amount of air in the jar as
the oxygen in air (air is about 20 percent oxygen) will “oxidize” and
damage the juice.
Purchase a food vacuum pump like Food Saver with a Ball jar
attachment. You can pour your juice into a pint jar and put the lid on
and use the Food Saver to suck out the air in the jar to vacuum pack
it. This will remove most of the oxygen that will damage the juice.
Immediately store it in the fridge and consume it when you are
ready. It is best to drink it as soon as possible and in any case
within 24 hours of juicing.

Most people juice in the morning, but if that does not work out well
for your schedule, please feel free to choose whatever meal works
best for your lifestyle.

Lesson 5: Clean your juicer properly.

We all know that if a juicer takes longer than a few minutes to clean,
we’ll find excuses not to juice at all. I find that using an old
toothbrush works well to clean any metal grater. If you buy a
high-quality juicer, the whole process should only take about 5 minutes. I find that using an old toothbrush works well on the metal grater. Whatever you do, you need to clean your juicer immediately after you
juice to prevent any remnants from contaminating the juicer with mold
growth. 

NOTE: Nutritional Typing and Juicing

According to Nutritional Typing principles, if you are a carb type,
vegetable juicing is STRONGLY recommended. With patients in our clinic,
we strongly encourage it if they expect to regain their health. If you
are a mixed type, it is certainly useful to juice. However, protein
types need to follow some specific guidelines to make it work for them.

Protein Types and Juicing

If you are a protein type, juicing needs to be done cautiously.
Celery, spinach, asparagus, string beans, and cauliflower would be your
best vegetables to juice. You can add some of the dark deep leafy
greens like collards, kale, and dandelion greens but do so cautiously
and pay careful attention to how you feel. You may also want to initially limit your serving size of juice to
no more than 6 oz., and store it properly and drink smaller amounts
throughout the day.
Also, to make drinking vegetable juice compatible with protein type
metabolism (which needs high amounts of fat), it is important to blend a
source of raw fat into the juice. Raw cream, raw butter, raw eggs,
avocado, coconut butter, or freshly ground flax seed are the sources of
raw fat that we most recommend. In addition to adding a source of raw fat to your juice, you may
also find that adding some, or even all, of the vegetable pulp into
your juice helps to make drinking the juiced vegetables more
satisfying.