Watchman News

By Dr. Mercola

Leptin, a hormone that plays a key role in regulating energy intake and energy expenditure, may be one of the most important hormones in your body that will determine your health and lifespan. Insulin is another, and the two work in tandem.
Both insulin and leptin resistance are associated with obesity, and impairment of their ability to transfer the information to receptors is the true foundational core of most all chronic degenerative diseases.
Metabolism can roughly be defined as the chemistry that turns food into life, and therefore insulin and leptin are both critical to health and disease. Insulin and leptin work together to control the quality of your metabolism, and, to a significant extent, your rate of metabolism.
By acquiring a better understanding of how leptin and its receptor interact, researchers now believe they will be able to find new treatments for obesity and other metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes, as well as inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis.
According to recent research published in the journal Molecular Cell,1 the leptin receptor has two hinged legs that swivel until they come in contact with leptin.
Once leptin attaches to the receptor, these legs stop swiveling and become rigid, thereby sending a signal to an enzyme called Janus kinase,2 which has the ability to bind inflammatory cytokines. It is believed that inhibiting the Janus kinases might help improve inflammatory and metabolic disorders.
Alan Saltiel, Director of the Life Sciences Institute, told Medical News Today:3

“This study may help solve an important issue we’ve been struggling with for some time… Since leptin is a master regulator of appetite, understanding why resistance to its effects develops in obesity has been a major obstacle to discovering new drugs for obesity and diabetes. Developing a clear picture of how leptin can bind to its receptor may be the first step in overcoming leptin resistance.”

The fact that the primary focus is on developing drug therapies to “fix” leptin resistance is understandable. That’s the only way the medical industry can make money. However, the way to correct leptin resistance has nothing to do with drugs, and everything to do with diet. But first…

What Exactly is Leptin?

Leptin is a very powerful and influential hormone produced by your fat cells. Your fat, by way of leptin, tells your brain whether you should be hungry, eat and make more fat, whether you should reproduce, or (partly by controlling insulin) whether to engage in maintenance and repair. In short, leptin is the way that your fat stores speak to your brain to let your brain know how much energy is available and, very importantly, what to do with it.
Therefore, leptin may be on top of the food chain in metabolic importance and relevance to disease.
If your leptin signaling is working properly, when your fat stores are “full,” this extra fat will cause a surge in your leptin level, which signals your brain to stop feeling hungry, to stop eating, to stop storing fat and to start burning some extra fat off.
Controlling hunger is a major (though not the only) way that leptin controls energy storage. Hunger is a very powerful, ancient, and deep-seated drive that, if stimulated long enough, will make you eat and store more energy. The only way to eat less in the long-term is to not be hungry, and the only way to do this is to control the hormones that regulate hunger, the primary one being leptin.

How Do You Become Leptin Resistant?

You become leptin-resistant by the same general mechanism that you become insulin-resistant – by continuous overexposure to high levels of the hormone. If you eat a diet that is high in sugar (particularly fructose), grains, and processed foods – the same type of diet that will also increase inflammation in your body – as the sugar gets metabolized in your fat cells, the fat releases surges in leptin.
Over time, if your body is exposed to too much leptin, it will become resistant, just as your body can become resistant to insulin.
The only known way to reestablish proper leptin (and insulin) signaling is to prevent those surges, and the only known way to do that is via diet. As such, diet can have a more profound effect on your health than any other known modality of medical treatment.
A strategic whole food diet, as detailed in my free nutrition plan, that emphasizes good fats and avoids blood sugar spikes coupled with targeted supplements will enhance insulin and leptin sensitivity so that your brain can once again hear the feedback signals from these hormones.

Obesity Helps Spur Cancer’s Growth, New Study Suggests

Leptin and insulin resistance is front and center of the issue of obesity, which is now a problem of epic proportions as it increases your risk for a wide variety of other serious diseases. At least 20 different diseases and conditions are directly attributable to being overweight. This societal problem has emerged in just the past four decades, in large part due to sorely misguided dietary guidelines.
One disease related to excess weight is cancer. And according to recent research, being obese promotes the growth of existing tumors regardless of diet, which may help explain why lean cancer patients often have better outcomes than their obese counterparts.
The animal study, published in the Oct. 15 issue of the journal Cancer Research,4 showed that tumors in obese mice grew much faster than in lean mice eating the same diet. According to the authors:

“In this study, we show that obesity facilitates tumor growth in mice irrespective of concurrent diet, suggesting a direct effect of excess white adipose tissue [fat tissue]. When transplanted into mice, adipose stromal cells can serve as perivascular adipocyte progenitors that promote tumor growth, perhaps helping explain the obesity-cancer link.”

The researchers discovered that the presence of cancer triggered adipose stromal cells – “white” fat cells – to migrate into the blood stream. Once these cells come across a tumor, some of them help provide oxygen and nutrients to the tumor, thereby feeding the growth of the cancer.
Lead researcher Mikhail Kolonin told MedicineNet:5

“The fact that these cells are present in tumors is still an emerging concept. We have shown that not only are they present, but they are also functional and affect tumor growth. Identifying the signals that cause these cells to be recruited to tumors and finding ways to block them might provide a new avenue of cancer treatment.”

Reduce Obesity to Quench Tumor Potential

As stated in the featured article, the implications are clear: “reduce obesity before the appearance of tumors and after.” Unfortunately, there was no mention at all about the role of lifestyle in reducing cancer-boosting “white” fat cells… Again, the focus is on developing drug treatments to convert cancer-boosting “white” fat cells to less harmful “brown” fat (a heat-generating type of fat that burns energy instead of storing it).
If you hinge your health and well-being on that, you’re likely going to miss the boat and join the ranks of cancer statistics. Research has shown that certain groups of people tend to have more brown fat than others, and there are direct correlations between the activation of brown fat and metabolic measures of good health. For example:

Slender people have more brown fat than obese people do
Younger people have more brown fat than elderly people, and
People with normal blood sugar levels have more brown fat than those with high blood sugar

So is there a way to convert harmful white fat into health promoting brown fat, without using a drug? Yes, there is. In one mouse study, the animals converted white fat into brown fat simply by exercising. The study, published in the journal Disease Models and Mechanisms6 in May 2012 found that, during exercise, the animals’ muscles released an enzyme called irisin, which triggered the conversion white fat cells to brown. Another study published in Nature,7 also suggests irisin may be a key to explaining the therapeutic benefits of exercise on metabolic disease. The authors write:

“Irisin acts on white adipose cells in culture and in vivo to stimulate UCP1 expression and a broad program of brown-fat-like development. Irisin is induced with exercise in mice and humans, and mildly increased irisin levels in the blood cause an increase in energy expenditure in mice with no changes in movement or food intake. This results in improvements in obesity and glucose homeostasis.”

Summary

So to summarize: Insulin and leptin resistance are core factors in obesity, which in turn is a risk factor for cancer and may boost tumor growth. But the answer lies not in a pill. To reverse insulin and leptin resistance:

Avoid, sugar, fructose, grains, and processed foods
Eat a healthful diet of whole foods, ideally organic, and replace the grain carbs with:

No-to-low sugar and grain carbs
 As much highly quality healthful fat as you want (saturated and monosaturated). Most people need upwards of 50-70 percent fats in their diet for optimal health. Good sources include coconut and coconut oil, avocados, butter, nuts, and animal fats. Also take a high-quality source of animal-based omega-3 fat, such as krill oil

Similarly, while researchers investigate the pharmaceutical avenues to convert white fat cells to brown in an effort to reduce the potential for cancer growth, other research has already shown that this can likely be achieved through exercise.
As I’ve said before, about 80 percent of the health benefits you reap from a healthy lifestyle comes from your diet, and the remaining 20 percent from exercise – but it’s a very important 20 percent, as it acts in tandem with and boosts the benefits derived from a proper diet. For maximum benefits, you’ll want to make sure to include high-intensity interval training, which is at the heart of my Peak Fitness program. To learn more, please see my previous article: The Major Exercise Mistake I Made for Over 30 Years.

By Dr. Mercola

Folic acid is perhaps the most well known B vitamin, and is especially important for pregnant women to avoid certain birth defects.
Now researchers have highlighted the importance of another member of the B vitamin complex – choline – which they say may one day be recommended for all pregnant women, the way folic acid is today.

What is Choline?

Choline is an essential nutrient your body makes in small amounts, however you must consume it through your diet to get enough. In adults, choline helps keep your cell membranes functioning properly, plays a role in nerve communications, prevents the buildup of homocysteine in your blood (elevated levels are linked to heart disease) and reduces chronic inflammation.
In pregnant women, choline plays an equally, if not more, important role, helping to prevent certain birth defects, such as spina bifida, and playing a role in brain development.
Prior research has concluded that choline intake during pregnancy “super-charged” the brain activity of animals in utero, indicating that it may boost cognitive function, improve learning and memory, and even diminish age-related memory decline and the brain’s vulnerability to toxins during childhood, as well as conferring protection later in life.1
It’s recommended that pregnant women consume 450 milligrams of choline a day, but the new study found this may not be enough…

Double the Recommended Amount of Choline During Pregnancy Protects Baby from Stress, Metabolic Disorders and More

The new research, published in The FASEB Journal,2 found the consumption of 930 mg of choline in the third trimester of pregnancy was linked to a 33 percent lower concentration of the stress hormone cortisol, compared to those who consumed 430 mg a day.
It’s known that babies exposed to high levels of cortisol in utero, such as might occur if a woman is under extreme stress, facing anxiety or suffering from depression, have an increased risk of stress-related and metabolic disorders. The researchers believe the beneficial impact of choline on lowering cortisol may protect the baby later in life from mental health conditions, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.
Interestingly, the higher choline intake led to changes in epigenetic markers in the fetus. Specifically, it affected markers that regulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which controls hormone production and activity. The higher intake of choline contributed to a more stable HPA axis, which in turn meant lower cortisol levels in the fetus. The changes in fetal genetic expression will likely continue into adulthood, where they play a role in disease prevention.

Epigenetic Changes May Last for Generations

One of the most intriguing aspects of epigenetics is that these changes are often passed down through generations. This was first shown by the research of Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., M.D., who conducted studies on cats in the 1930s. He found that cats fed a healthy, raw-food diet thrived, while those fed on a primarily cooked-meat diet developed degenerative diseases – and those changes continued on through three generations.
Each generation of “junk-food” cats got progressively sicker, until they could no longer reproduce and eventually died off completely by the fourth generation.
Just this year, a study on rats showed those exposed to chemicals or foods that raise estrogen levels during pregnancy produce daughters that have a higher than normal risk for breast cancer – and that risk is passed on to the next two generations.3 It was not genetic mutations that were passed on, but rather epigenetic alterations that modulate the expression of your genes, similar to what was found in the FASEB Journal study.

You Have the Ability to Change Inherited Epigenetic Alterations

The good news about all of this is that even if you inherited a certain increased disease risk from your mother or grandmother (or you think you passed one on to your child), it is not set in stone. As you age, your genome does not change but your epigenome changes dramatically, especially during critical periods of life, such as adolescence. It is influenced by physical and emotional stresses, and lifestyle factors, which, depending on their effects, may either optimize your genetic expression for health or make it favor disease development.
There are literally new epigenetic discoveries being made every day, and it’s becoming quite clear that eating healthy foods is one of the most powerful steps you can take to optimize your genetic expression.
Certain foods, such as broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, garlic, and onions contain substances that activate tumor suppressor genes and deactivate cancer-associated genes (oncogenes). And now we see that choline appears to influence cortisol production in utero. Your best bet is to take advantage of the many epigenetic influencers in your diet by eating a wide variety of whole foods…
For additional tips, I suggest you read through my comprehensive and recently revised nutrition plan, which will give tools for eating healthy, dealing with stress, and living a lifestyle that will support your epigenetic health.

What are the Best Dietary Sources of Choline?

If you’re currently pregnant, it seems prudent to make sure your diet contains plenty of choline-rich foods, as this will be your primary source of this essential nutrient (most prenatal vitamins do not contain choline). Unfortunately for many vegetarians, animal foods like eggs and meat are some of the best sources of choline, so if you’re a vegan or vegetarian who does not consume any animal foods, you may be at risk of deficiency.
The following chart shows some of the best choline sources to help you choose your foods wisely:4

Food
Serving
Total Choline (mg)

Beef liver, pan fried
3 ounces
355

Wheat germ, toasted
1 cup
172

Egg
1 large
126

Beef, trim cut, cooked
3 ounces
67

Brussel sprouts, cooked
1 cup
63

Broccoli, cooked
1 cup, chopped
62

Salmon
3 ounces
56

Milk, skim
8 fl oz.
38

Peanut butter, smooth
2 tablespoons
20

By Dr. Mercola

A new study indicates bisphenol-A (BPA) – a chemical already found to be an endocrine disrupter linked to cancer and reproductive and fetal development problems – may be contributing to narrowed arteries.
Unfortunately, unequivocal proof of the chemical’s dangers to the arteries will be difficult to obtain because experiments on humans are not feasible, but the study’s authors said the growing body of evidence is impressive enough to add BPA exposure to the known risk factors for heart disease.

BPA Linked to Narrowed Arteries

Coronary, carotid and aorticartery stenosis – specific examples of a condition generally known as narrowed arteries – can block blood flow in your arteries, with serious if not lethal health consequences. The narrower your arteries become, the more blood flow gets blocked, which can ultimately lead to not only symptoms of chest pain and tightness but also heart attack and stroke.
In the latest study, researchers looked at levels of urinary BPA levels and artery narrowing in close to 600 people, and found that those with higher urinary BPA levels were more likely to have an increased risk for severe narrowing of the arteries.1 The same research team has conducted three other studies that have also shown an association between BPA and heart risks, including:

A 2008 study that found higher BPA concentrations were associated with heart2
A 2010 study that found higher BPA exposure was consistently associated with heart disease in the general U.S. adult population;3 in fact, U.S. adults with the highest levels of BPA in their urine were more than twice as likely to develop coronary heart disease than those with the lowest levels
A 2012 study that found for each 4.56 ng/mL increase in BPA concentration, there was a 13 percent greater risk of heart disease4

BPA is Found in Nearly Everyone… and Heart Disease is the Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.

While these studies are not proof that BPA causes heart disease, they certainly raise serious questions about why the chemical is still being so widely used across the globe.
BPA is so pervasive that scientists have found that 95 percent of people tested have potentially dangerous levels of BPA in their bodies… and heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death in the United States. BPA is clearly not the only factor involved in heart disease, but given its widespread use – and the fact that it is even commonly found in the umbilical cords of babies in utero – any negative impact it makes on human health could prove disastrous.
Not to mention, heart disease is not the only problem with BPA.
BPA is an endocrine disrupter, which means it mimics and/or interferes with your body’s hormones, subsequently “disrupting” 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 alike, and leading to decreased sperm quality, early puberty, premature mammary gland development, disrupted reproductive cycles and ovarian dysfunction, cancer and heart disease, among numerous other health problems. Research has even found that “higher BPA exposure is associated with general and central obesity in the general adult population of the United States,”5 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.6

FDA Not Convinced of BPA’s Dangers

Despite the concerning research pouring in, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states that they are aware studies have found BPA is a hazard to people, but says they have “carefully assessed these studies and finds no convincing evidence to support that belief.”7
Unfortunately, although the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a petition with the FDA calling for the agency to prohibit the use of BPA in products manufactured in the United States, earlier this year the FDA announced that it would be denying NRDC’s petition, noting that it would “make any necessary changes to BPA’s status based on the science.”
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 in response to consumer demand, but it is still widely used. Thanks to the FDA’s refusal to ban BPA from U.S. food packaging, 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.8

Plastics to Canned Goods: How are You Being Exposed to BPA?

You’re probably aware that BPA is often found in plastic food containers and bottles, but plastic is not the only route of exposure. Canned goods, which often have a lining that contains BPA, may in fact be an even greater contributor. In one study, eating canned soup for five days increased study participants’ urinary concentrations of BPA by more than 1,000% compared to eating freshly made soup.9
The researchers believe canned goods may be an even greater source of exposure to BPA than plastics. So watch out for canned tomatoes and other canned vegetables, canned soups and canned beverages, like soda or juice.
Other often-overlooked routes of exposure include:

Receipts: A study in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry found that of 13 thermal printing papers (the type often used for receipts) analyzed, 11 contained BPA.10 Holding the paper for just 5 seconds was enough to transfer BPA onto a person’s skin, and the amount of BPA transferred increased by about 10 times if the fingers were wet or greasy.
Currency: In a study published in Environmental Science and Technology, researchers analyzed paper currencies from 21 countries for the presence of BPA, and the chemical was detected in every sample.11 They also measured the transfer of BPA from thermal receipt paper to currency by placing the two together in a wallet for 24 hours. This dramatically increased the concentrations of BPA on the money, which again suggests that receipts are highly contaminated.

So in order to really reduce your BPA exposure, you need to watch out for:

Canned foods and soda cans
All BPA-containing plastics and food packaging
Certain tooth sealants
Certain BPA-free plastics (which can contain similar endocrine-disrupting chemicals)
Receipts and currency (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 on lotion or have any other greasy substance on your hands, as this may increase your exposure)

By Dr. Mercola

Actos – the brand name for a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes – is presently embroiled in thousands of lawsuits alleging that the drug causes severe side effects including heart failure, macular edema and bladder cancer.
Even so, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has gone ahead and approved Mylan Lab’s plan to sell a generic version of this dangerous drug (pioglitazone), justifying their reasoning by saying this gives patients “affordable treatment options.”
The FDA addressed the heart failure and bladder cancer possibilities with a recommendation that doctors carefully monitor patients taking the new generic version… however, what the new generic drug really does is expose even more people to this drug class’ unacceptable, and sometimes deadly, side effects – to treat a disease that responds very well to dietary and exercise changes!

Actos and its Generic Riddled With Serious Health Risks

Actos works by helping to control blood sugar levels in people with type 2 diabetes, a method that “experts” say will help to reduce the long-term health complications of diabetes and keep the disease under control. 
But diabetes treatments concentrating merely on lowering blood sugar can actually worsen, rather than remedy, the underlying metabolic dysfunction that is at the root of type 2 diabetes. And along with completely ignoring the underlying reasons why the diabetes developed in the first place, Actos carries some very serious health risks.
For starters, Actos has a Boxed Warning that states the drug may cause or worsen heart failure.
This risk has been somewhat overshadowed by the attention given to Avandia, a similar diabetes drug in the same class that has been found to cause a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack, and a 64 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death, compared to patients treated with other methods.1 However, although Actos is regarded as a “safer” option for your heart than Avandia, it also poses serious risks to your heart.
And that’s not all.
Actos’ label also notes that the use of pioglitazone for more than one year may be associated with an increased risk of bladder cancer. In fact, new research just out from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania shows that people who take this drug for five years or more are two to three times more likely to develop bladder cancer than those who take a different form of diabetes drug.2 
Actos has already been removed from the market in both Germany and France due to the bladder cancer risks… but in the United States we now have not only Actos, but a generic version as well!
In a twist to the story, two days before the FDA approved Mylan’s generic Actos, Watson Pharmaceuticals sued the FDA for not following through on giving Watson exclusivity for its generic version of Actos, which was originally scheduled to be released on August 17.
There are as many as 13,000 Actos lawsuits currently pending, related to both heart failure and bladder cancer cases, as well as other side effects including bone fractures and lactic acidosis.

Actos Whistleblower Reveals Fraud, Deception and Serious Dangers

Dr. Helen Ge worked for Takeda (Actos’ maker) in the company’s pharmacovigilance division. 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, the diabetes drug mentioned earlier 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, alleging that Takeda, like many pharmaceutical companies, was interested in protecting their profits, first and foremost, which makes the approval of a generic version of this drug all the more unsettling. Actos is Takeda’s most profitable drug, bringing in $3.4 billion in annual sales.
Dr. Ge noted:3

“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.”

So far Avandia has been the poster child for what is wrong with drug treatment of type 2 diabetes. And it took nearly 10 years of the drug being on the market for the FDA to take action and restrict access to this dangerous drug. In the meantime, millions of people have taken Avandia and have been exposed to these unacceptably high-risk side effects, for a drug that in no way treats the underlying causes of diabetes.
More than 80,000 diabetics have suffered from strokes, heart failure or other complications including lethal heart attacks from this dangerous drug… and now it appears Actos and its generic versions may be stepping in to fill its shoes.

What You Should Know About Diabetes Drugs…

Drugs can’t cure diabetes, as they do nothing to address the underlying causes. Drugs like Actos and Avandia work by tricking diabetes patients’ bodies to become more sensitive to their own insulin, helping to control blood sugar levels. Tricking the body in non-ancestral and time-honored ways in which our biochemistry and genetics have adjusted to for many eons typically results in devastating effects eventually if pursued long enough, and the Actos and Avandia experience confirms this.
But it is important to understand that diabetes is NOT strictly 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 suppressing the symptom of elevated blood sugar rather than addressing the underlying causes, is doomed to fail in most cases.
Because type 2 diabetes arises from faulty leptin and insulin signaling it is therefore a fully preventable condition that can be controlled or reversed by recovering your insulin and leptin sensitivities. However, the only known long-term effective way to reestablish proper leptin and insulin signaling is through proper diet and exercise. There is NO drug that can safely 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.
If you have type 2 diabetes, I strongly suggest that you consult with a health care practitioner who is knowledgeable about its true underlying cause, and who can work with you to reverse the condition without the use of drugs. Some of the most helpful guidelines to successfully do this include:

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 including some high-intensity Peak Fitness exercises for optimal results.
Avoid synthetic 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 also have a powerful effect on normalizing your blood pressure, which has virtually identical response improvement to diabetic interventions.
Optimize your gut flora. Your gut is a living ecosystem, full of many different types of bacteria. The more beneficial bacteria you have, the more likely your blood sugar will be in balance. Indeed, new research published in the journal Lipids in Health and Disease found that a combination of prebiotics and probiotics, taken for 30 days, resulted in a significant reduction in fasting blood sugar in human subjects.4

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.

By Dr. Mercola

Three anemia drugs – Epogen, Procrit and Aranesp – have been among the best-selling prescription drugs in the United States for years, generating more than $8 billion a year for their makers, Amgen and Johnson & Johnson.
They were blockbuster drugs that stimulate your body to produce new red blood cells, which supposedly helped boost kidney and cancer patients’ energy and, ultimately, enhanced their lives.
But now, after millions of people have taken these drugs, it’s come out that the benefits were “wildly overstated, and potentially lethal side effects, such as cancer and strokes, were overlooked.”1
Worse still, the Washington Post has uncovered a series of unsettling events that show just how far drug makers were willing to go to get rich…

Doctors Earned Profits of Up to 30 Percent Just for Prescribing the Drugs

And this was one of the first problems. Drug makers lobbied Congress in order to put a system into place so that doctors and hospitals would be reimbursed more for the drugs they prescribed to Medicare patients than what they actually paid for them. The markup could be as high as 30 percent, and the higher the dose prescribed, the more money they made.
According to Charles Bennett, endowed chair at the Medication Safety and Efficacy Center of Economic Excellence at the University of South Carolina, in the Washington Post:

“It was just so easy to do – you put this stuff in the patient’s arm, and you made thousands of dollars… An oncologist could make anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 a year from this alone. And all the while they were told that it was good for the patient.”

Higher Doses Pushed to a Growing Number of Patients

Initially, patients with kidney disease, who often suffer from anemia, were the key target market for the drugs. If anemia is severe enough, blood transfusions are required to boost red blood cell counts. Epogen, Procrit, and, later, Aranesp, were able to accomplish the same boost in blood cells without the need for transfusions.
The Washington Post reported:

“The trouble would arise as the drugmakers won FDA approval for vastly expanded uses, pushing it in larger doses, for milder anemia and for patients with a wider array of illnesses. Very quickly, the market included nearly all dialysis patients, not just the roughly 16 percent who required blood transfusions. The size of average doses would more than triple. And over the next five years, the FDA would approve it to treat anemia in patients with cancer and AIDS, as well as those getting hip and knee surgery.

The key to their marketing was the claim that the drugs at higher doses could make patients feel better. By 1994, the drug’s label, approved by the FDA, advertised a range of benefits: ‘statistically significant improvements for… health, sex life, well-being, psychological effect, life satisfaction, and happiness.'”

These claims, however, were based on a series of incomplete and never-published research, some of which were drawn out over a decade or more only to show inconclusive results. One safety study on cancer patients that was supposed to be finished in 2008 is still not complete, and won’t be until 2017, according to Amgen, which will be nearly 25 years after the drugs were approved for cancer patients.
And as it turns out, the claims that the drugs lead to improved quality of life have since been withdrawn because they don’t meet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) standards of proof.

Higher Doses Increased Patients’ Risk of Dying – Study Results Missing Key Data

In 1998, the Normal Hematocrit Trial was published, which explored giving higher doses of drugs to dialysis patients in order to boost their red blood cell count above those generally achieved with transfusion.2 The study did, in fact, find that patients receiving the higher drug dose were dying or having heart attacks at a higher rate than those receiving the lower dose; the trial was actually halted because of this.
However, rather than sounding an alarm bell, when the study was published the authors downplayed the danger, calling the increased death and heart attack rate “not significant.” And while no difference was found in quality of life between patients receiving the higher or lower dose, this was not noted in the published study. (Four of the study’s eight authors were employed by Amgen, and two have served as consultants.)
As the years went by, health care providers and the drug companies continued to profit from the ever-rising doses of these drugs being prescribed – despite continued studies coming out questioning their safety. It wasn’t until years later, in 2011, that the FDA put out a safety announcement calling for more conservative dosing of the drugs “because of data showing increased risks of cardiovascular events.”3
The Washington Post reported:

“For years, a small Bethesda-based nonprofit think tank, the Medical Technology and Practice Patterns Institute, had been publishing studies that challenged the conventional enthusiasm for the drug and the government policies that it said promoted their overuse.
Then in November 2006, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that kidney patients targeted for higher doses were linked to higher risks of hospitalization, strokes and death. In December, a group of Danish researchers said that it had stopped a trial of Aranesp in cancer patients because of an increase in deaths and tumor growths. And that was just the beginning of the bad news…”

The FDA Finally Cracks Down

The Danish research seemed to be the breaking point for the anemia drug trio.

“‘Then the FDA cracked down,’ The Washington Post reported. ‘The drugs’ use was ruled out in cancer patients considered curable, it was ruled out in patients considered just slightly anemic, maximum recommended doses were lowered, and the agency told doctors in many cases to use the smallest amount possible to avoid a blood transfusion.

The agency also began to look askance at the alleged benefits, for which the evidence, in retrospect, seemed flimsy. There was no solid proof, under revised FDA guidelines for such measures, that use of the drugs leads to ‘statistically significant’ improvements in happiness and other benefits, the agency said. Those quality-of-life claims, once so critical to the drug’s adoption, were removed from the label.

…Last year, nearly two decades after the Office of the Inspector General first suggested it, the economic incentives to use more of the drugs on patients in dialysis disappeared.”

No major class-action suits have so far been filed against the drugs’ makers; it is often difficult to prove the drugs were the cause of death, particularly because patients who received them were typically already facing chronic health problems. Still, Amgen has put aside a reported $780 million to settle various claims, including some for alleged illegal sales tactics – a paltry compensation to those who have lost loved ones. This is, unfortunately, just the latest drug scandal to be brought to the public’s attention… and it surely won’t be the last.

Pharma Giant Pfizer Fined for Bribing Officials in Eastern Europe and China

Earlier this month, it was revealed that U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its subsidiary Wyeth have been charged with paying off officials, doctors and healthcare professionals in Eastern Europe and China to secure approval and registration of the companies’ products.

The company allegedly paid millions of dollars in bribes from 2001 to 2007. The bribery was so blatant and entwined in the sales practices that they even offered points and bonus programs to improperly reward foreign officials who proved to be the best customers, according to the head of the SEC’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit. Obviously, such corrupt pay-offs puts honest companies at a disadvantage, James McJunkin, assistant director of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation pointed out.4

And that is the over-riding theme we see again and again – these companies are typically NOT honest, yet we trust them with the most sacred possession we have, our health. For punishment, Pfizer will be paying various fines ranging from $15 million to $26 million – barely a slap on the wrist for a company that makes billions of dollars a year.

Big Pharma’s Lack of Ethics, Regard for Patient Safety Seemingly Knows No Bounds

If it seems like the number of lawsuits that Big Pharma is settling – many of them out of court without going to trial – are rising, they are. From Merck’s $950-million Vioxx deal to the latest announcement that Pfizer has made an $896-million settlement with Prempro victims, the deals show no signs of stopping. Most of the lawsuits are being filed in conjunction with, or aided by, the U.S. Department of Justice, many of them originating from former employees-turned-whistleblowers who divulged marketing misdoings by their employers.

The litigation and settlements are starting to rattle the drug industry, which is becoming no stranger to billion-dollar settlements. Most likely near the end of 2012, Johnson & Johnson reportedly will settle for as much $2.2 billion for its fraudulent marketing of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal.

That amount rivals what was the largest health care fraud settlement to date – $2.3 billion paid by Pfizer in 2009, also for illegally promoting uses of four of its drugs. However, now it’s come out that GlaxoSmithKline has agreed to a whopping $3-billion settlement – the largest in U.S. history for health care fraud – with the U.S. government, again for advertising drugs for unapproved uses, along with using gifts to persuade doctors to prescribe the drugs.5

Unfortunately, Americans are disproportionally supporting this behemoth of an industry. Americans, including children, are the most drugged people in the entire world, with the average adult taking 11 prescription drugs – each of which comes with an average of 70 different potential side effects that are then typically addressed with even more drugs…

The situation has gotten out of hand, especially since there’s a mountain of evidence supporting the use of alternatives, and there’s very strong evidence that some “alternative” treatments, such as diet and exercise, are FAR more effective, not to mention safer, than any of the drugs currently in use. My site is chock full of free comprehensive recommendations that can serve as an excellent starting point to break free from this fatally flawed paradigm. The tools I provide on this site will help you to reduce your reliance on the broken health care system, including its overuse of drugs, and provide you with the tools and resources to Take Control of Your Health.

By Dr. Mercola

Do you ever find that eating breakfast – even a “solid” breakfast like steak and eggs – makes you hungry?
You start your day off right, re-fueling after sleep, then sometime around 30 minutes to 2 hours or so later you’re hungry again, as though you never even ate. It’s not all in your head, and you’re not alone.
Many experience a similar reaction to breakfast, and in the featured article nutritional consultant and personal trainer Martin Berkhan may have the answer to why post-breakfast hunger occurs, and what will get you on the right eating track.
This might sound surprising at first, but it actually begins with omitting breakfast altogether.

Why Eating Breakfast Might Make You Hungrier

The interesting aspect about eating first thing in the morning is that it coincides with your circadian cortisol peak, that is, the time of day when your cortisol (stress hormone) levels rise and reach their peak.
The circadian cortisol peak has an impact on your insulin secretion, such that when you eat during this time it leads to a rapid and large insulin release, and a corresponding rapid drop in blood sugar levels, more so than when you eat at other times of the day. If you’re healthy, your blood sugar levels won’t drop to a dangerously low level (such as can occur with hypoglycemia) but they can drop low enough to make you feel hungry.
Berkhan explains:

“In the “glucostatic theory”, Jean Mayer in the 1950’s proposed that low blood sugar served as the primary hunger-triggering signal that prompted us to feed. Later studies have taught us that appetite regulation is way more complicated than that, but there is clearly a role for blood glucose in this equation.
Building on Mayer’s theory, Campfield has proposed a more complex and refined theory, in which he – briefly summarized – suggests that falling blood glucose levels might serve as a hunger signal. This has been echoed elsewhere, in the sense that the speed of which blood glucose falls can serve as an alarm signal in a sense – while a prompt lowering of post-prandial blood glucose levels is desirable, too steep of a decline can be interpreted as danger, and trigger a hunger signal.”

This is more commonly experienced in people who are not insulin resistant (such as those who are overweight or have type 2 diabetes), but rather are lean and “insulin sensitive.” Because the circadian cortisol peak adds another insulin-boosting effect on top of an already insulin-sensitive individual, the low blood sugar, and subsequent hunger, can be more pronounced.
Although this idea goes against the conventional idea of making sure to never skip meals, especially breakfast; Berkhan says that once he ditched breakfast he found it was much easier to control food cravings and hunger throughout the day.

Why I Stopped Eating Breakfast

I have revised my personal eating schedule to eliminate breakfast and restrict the time I eat food to a period of about six to seven hours, which is typically from noon to 6 or 7 pm. Our ancestors rarely had access to food 24/7 like we do today, and it makes sense that our genes are optimized for intermittent fasting.
It takes about six to eight hours for your body to metabolize your glycogen stores and after that you actually start to shift to burning fat. However if you are replenishing your glycogen by eating every eight hours, you make it far more difficult for your body to actually use your fat stores as fuel.
On the days that I exercise in the morning, I will have two scoops of Pure Power Protein about 30 minutes after the workout to provide nutrients, especially leucine, for muscle growth and repair.
Interestingly, since adopting this approach for the past few months I have lost two inches from my waist size and gained three pounds, which means I have lost body fat and gained muscle mass. This has been a personal experiment of mine to see if I can get back to my high school waist size of 32 inches, even though I weighed 20 pounds less back then. A growing body of intriguing research is, in fact, showing that intermittent fasting may be a key weight loss tool.

The Link Between Intermittent Fasting and Weight Loss, Health Benefits

When researchers from the Salk Institute fed mice the same high-fat, high-calorie diet but altered when they were able to eat, some striking results occurred. One group had access to food both day and night, while the other group had access to food for only eight hours at night (the most active period for mice). In human terms, this would mean eating only for 8 hours during the day.
Despite consuming the same number of calories, mice that had access to food for only eight hours stayed lean and did not develop health problems like high blood sugar or chronic inflammation.1 They even had improved endurance motor coordination on the exercise wheel. The all-day access group, on the other hand, became obese and were plagued with health problems including:

High cholesterol
High blood sugar
Fatty liver disease
Metabolic problems

Another recent animal study published in the International Journal of Endocrinology showed a beneficial glycemic effect from fasting that resulted in a lower gain in body weight than in non-fasting animals.2 Other research suggests fasting triggers a variety of health-promoting hormonal and metabolic changes similar to those that occur when you exercise.
Fasting is historically commonplace as it has been a part of spiritual practice for millennia. Modern research has also confirmed there are many good reasons to fast intermittently, including:

Normalizing your insulin sensitivity, which is key for optimal health as insulin resistance is a primary contributing factor to nearly all chronic disease, from diabetes to heart disease and even cancer
Normalizing ghrelin levels, also known as “the hunger hormone”
Promoting human growth hormone (HGH) production, which plays an important part in health, fitness and slowing the aging process
Lowering triglyceride levels
Reducing inflammation and lessening free radical damage

There’s also plenty of research showing that fasting has a beneficial impact on longevity in animals. There are a number of mechanisms contributing to this effect. Normalizing insulin sensitivity is a major one, but fasting also inhibits the mTOR pathway, which plays an important part in driving the aging process. Fasting has even been linked to a dramatic rise in human growth hormone (HGH)—1,300 percent in women, and an astounding 2,000 percent in men!3
HGH, commonly referred to as “the fitness hormone,” plays an important role in maintaining health, fitness and longevity, including promotion of muscle growth, and boosting fat loss by revving up your metabolism. The fact that fasting improves a number of potent disease markers also contributes to fasting’s overall beneficial effects on general health.
Exercising while in a fasted state has also been shown to produce many beneficial changes, and it works particularly well to exercise first thing in the morning and delay your first meal until later in the day. To learn more about this strategy, please see this previous article by fitness expert Ori Hofmekler.

Is Skipping Breakfast Right for You?

There’s no cut and dry answer to this question, as everyone responds differently to intermittent fasting.
For example, there is good evidence supporting the recommendation to eat a protein-heavy breakfast if you want to lose weight, and even more so if you exercise first thing in the morning to optimize muscle growth and recovery. But there may be times when you feel like you’ve hit a plateau, and while your diet and exercise routine may be good, the simple act of skipping breakfast and exercising on an empty stomach could be just the thing that will kick start you onto that next level.
Certain health conditions should make you think twice about fasting, including if you’re hypoglycemic or diabetic. Hypoglycemia is a condition characterized by an abnormally low level of blood sugar. Ideally, you should avoid fasting if you’re hypoglycemic, and work on your overall diet to normalize your blood sugar levels first. Then try out one of the less rigid versions of fasting before even considering a full 24-hour fast.
As for pregnant and/or lactating women, I don’t believe fasting would be a wise choice. Your baby needs plenty of nutrients, during and after birth, and there’s no research supporting fasting during this important time. There are several studies on fasting during pregnancy, and all suggest it might be contraindicated, as it can alter fetal breathing patterns, heartbeat, and increase gestational diabetes. It may even induce premature labor.
If you’re healthy and you do decide to give intermittent fasting a try, do so gradually (don’t try to do a 24-hour fast on your first day). Ultimately, you can opt for a 16-, 20-, or 24-hour fast once or twice a week, or try fasting every other day, or simply delaying certain meals, such as skipping breakfast and exercising on an empty stomach.
There are many options, and you can discover what works best for you by listening to your body, and going slow; work your way up to longer fasts if your normal schedule has included multiple meals a day. You can also start out by ending your meals earlier in the evening or late afternoon and fasting overnight while you sleep.
Your body will let you know whether you’ve found the right combination of intermittent fasting for you, as you should experience a boost in energy and likely weight loss, if necessary, once you get started. If you feel weak, lightheaded, very hungry or fatigued while fasting, these are signs that you may be fasting for too long and it’s time to tweak your program.

By Dr. Mercola

Could it be that the number of calories you burn in a day is more dependent on your biological roots than the number of minutes you spend being physically active?
Intriguing new research has indeed shown that it’s possible human metabolic rates are more evolutionary in origin than a reflection of our modern lifestyles – confirming that what you choose to eat could be the most important factor in your risk of becoming overweight or obese.

Hunter-Gatherers Burn the Same Number of Calories as the Average American

The Hadza tribe of Tanzania still leads an ancient lifestyle that includes daily hunting and foraging for berries, roots and fruit. It’s all done on foot, using bows, digging sticks and axes – no guns. Clearly, this is a high level of physical activity that would, according to current beliefs, burn a far greater number of calories than, say, sitting at a computer for eight hours.
What the new research found, however, was that even though physical activity levels were greater among the Hadza people, the average daily energy expenditure was no different than that of Westerners! In other words, even though tribe members spent many hours trekking long distances to hunt and forage for food, they still expended no more calories each day than adults in modern Europe and the United States.
Upending the long-held science of metabolism, the findings indicate that daily energy expenditure may be an “evolved physiological trait largely independent of cultural differences.”
Of course, what this means to modern man is that eating more than the number of calories most human bodies are “wired” for could mean you’ll gain weight – even if you’re exercising religiously. Study author Dr. Herman Pontzer of the department of anthropology at Hunter College, New York told the BBC News:1

“This to me says that the big reason that Westerners are getting fat is because we eat too much – it’s not because we exercise too little. Being active is really important to your health but it won’t keep you thin – we need to eat less to do that.”

Your Diet is More Important Than Exercise for Losing Weight

As I’ve been saying for years, about 80 percent of your ability to reduce excess body fat is determined by what you eat, with the other 20 percent related to exercise and other healthy lifestyle habits such as sleep and stress reduction. What this means is that if your diet is based on sugar/fructose and processed junk food, it’s highly likely that your weight is going to become an issue.
About one-third of U.S. adults fall into the obese category, and a staggering two-thirds or more of Americans are overweight. Dietary culprit #1 is easily fructose, sugars and grains. According to the 2010 Report by the Advisory Committee on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans,2 the top 10 sources of calories in the American diet are:

1.    Grain-based desserts (cakes, cookies, donuts, pies, crisps, cobblers, and granola bars) 139 calories a day
6.    Alcoholic beverages

2.    Yeast breads, 129 calories a day

7.   Pasta and pasta dishes

3.    Chicken and chicken-mixed dishes, 121 calories a day

8.   Mexican mixed dishes

4.    Soda, energy drinks, and sports drinks, 114 calories a day

9.   Beef and beef-mixed dishes

5.    Pizza, 98 calories a day

10.   Dairy desserts

 
Looking at this list detailing the top sources of calories in the American diet, it’s easy to recognize that the dietary roots of the American weight problem is linked to carbs—sugars (primarily fructose) and grains—in the form of processed foods and sweet drinks. If it’s true that we burn about the same number of calories a day as Tanzanian hunter-gatherers who are physically active at a level only the most dedicated of athletes in America likely attain – then the reason why so many Americans are overweight while the hunger-gatherers are lean comes down to food choices.
I believe the two primary keys for successful weight management are severely restricting carbohydrates (sugars, fructose, and grains) in your diet, and increasing healthy fat consumption. This will optimize insulin and leptin levels, which is key for maintaining a healthy weight and optimal health. For more details, I suggest you review my Optimized Nutrition Plan, which is a comprehensive and step-by-step guide to help you make health-promoting food and lifestyle choices. This includes:

Limit your fructose to less than 25 grams per day, and, ideally to less than 15 grams per day, as you’re likely consuming ‘hidden’ fructose if you eat processed foods or sweetened beverages
Limit or eliminate all processed foods
Eliminate all gluten, and highly allergenic foods from your diet

Increase the amount of fresh vegetables in your diet, and consider juicing
Eat at least one-third of your food uncooked (raw), or as much as you can manage
Avoid artificial sweeteners of all kinds

Should Your Diet Mimic the Hunter-Gatherers’?

During the Paleolithic period many thousands of years ago, people ate primarily vegetables, fruit, nuts, roots and meat—and a wide variety of it. Today, these staples have been largely replaced with refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, cereal, bread, potatoes and pasteurized milk products… and a much narrower selection of fruits, vegetables, roots and nuts.
While we may consider ourselves to be at the pinnacle of human development, our modern food manufacturing processes have not created a race of super-humans in possession of great health and longevity. Humans today suffer more chronic and debilitating diseases, including obesity, than ever before. And there can be little doubt that our food choices play a major role in this development. By eating foods that are concordant with your genetic ancestry, you can avoid many of the diseases associated with our modern diet, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
You can actually mold your diet around the principles of Paleo eating rather easily by following my nutrition plan.
Episodes of intermittent fasting may also be important, as our ancestors clearly did not have access to food on a 24/7 basis like we do today. I believe it to be one of the most profound interventions for the 21st century. Quite simply, we’ve strayed too far from the foods we are designed to eat, so going back to basics and refocusing your diet on fresh, whole, unprocessed, “real” food can improve just about anyone’s health. In addition to the points noted above, a “healthy diet” is qualified by the following:

Unprocessed whole foods
Organic or grass-fed, and free from additives and genetically modified ingredients
Comes from high-quality, local sources
Carbohydrates primarily come from vegetables (except corn and potatoes, which should typically be avoided)

Should You Exercise Like the Hunter-Gatherers Too?

While your diet may be the driving factor behind your weight, exercise is still an essential component of good health, fitness and longevity. Interestingly, just as a hunter-gatherer diet may be beneficial, there’s a lot to be said about moving like a hunter-gatherer too. Instead of being sedentary for much of the day and then running for an hour on a treadmill, our ancient ancestors combined lots of walking with regular lifting and short bursts of high-intensity activities, and health experts agree that this may be a healthier way to live because this is what your body is “wired” for.
My Peak Fitness program incorporates this essential factor, which is, I believe, why so many people have achieved such great results with it. A summary of what researchers believe might be an ideal exercise prescription would include the following aspects of normal hunger-gatherer living:

A variety of exercises performed regularly (weight training, cardio, stretching, etc.)
Alternate difficult days with easier days
Exercise outdoors, which helps maintain vitamin D levels and improve mood

Peak Fitness sessions performed no more than three times a week
Weight training 2-3x a week
Walk and run on softer, uneven terrain, such as grass and dirt, possibly barefoot or using “simpler shoes that do not drastically restrict foot motion or alter natural foot strike dynamics”

Exercise with a friend to receive social stimulation as well
Ample time for rest after physical exertion
Recreational activities, including dancing and sex

By Dr. Mercola

There’s no shortage of stories detailing conflicts of interest—so many in fact that you may be getting sick and tired of hearing of them. However, this is a truly important issue that must be tackled, and one of the ways of doing that is by exposing it to the harsh light of day. As long as people remain unaware, or turn a blind eye, it will continue unabated.
The price we pay for not paying attention is the loss of health, as the information disseminated by grossly compromised health agencies is skewed in favor of various industries, with Big Pharma leading the pack as one of the most powerful political and governmental influences.
Here, I will review two important revolving-door cases, and while neither is recent news, many of you may still be unaware of them.

Former CDC Director Now President of Merck’s Vaccine Unit

In the summer of 2011, Merck president Julie Gerberding said in a news interview1 that she’s “very bullish on vaccines,” as she recounted the various ways she helps Merck sell its products. What she didn’t divulge was her motivation for leaving her job as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—an agency charged with overseeing vaccines and drug companies—and join Merck in the first place, back in January 2010.
If you don’t see the enormity of the influence her former high-level ties to the CDC can have, just consider the fact that Merck makes 14 of the 17 pediatric vaccines recommended by the CDC, and 9 of the 10 recommended for adults, and while vaccine safety advocates are trying to rein in the number of vaccines given to babies, safety concerns keep falling on deaf ears. The vaccine industry is booming, and it’s become quite clear that profit potential is the driving factor behind it.
One of the reasons for this is because vaccine patents do not expire like drugs do, so each vaccine adopted for widespread use has the potential to make enormous, continuous profits for decades to come. Vaccine makers also enjoy a high degree of immunity against lawsuits—and in the case of pandemic vaccines, absolute immunity—so the financial liability when something goes wrong is very low, compared to drugs.

Gerberding has a Long History of Disregard for Vaccine Safety

Joining a parade of other high-ranking government officials who pass through the revolving doors between government and Big Pharma, Gerberding left a trail of controversy behind her when she left the CDC. While a 2009 article by the Institute for Southern Studies lists a number of them2, I believe they left out the most important ones, namely her misinformation campaign about the pandemic swine flu vaccine, as well as her naive stance on vaccine safety issues in general.
The CDC disseminated extremely exaggerated data on the 2009 H1N1 “pandemic” and urged almost everyone in the U.S. to take the new, untested vaccines. When questions arose, they blocked CBS’s requests for samples of the swine flu cases and added obstacles to getting information. Despite the many dangers that have since been linked to the hastily developed vaccine—including the confirmed link to narcolepsy—the H1N1 vaccine is now part and parcel of the “regular” seasonal flu vaccine, although most people are completely unaware of this fact. And the CDC is now, for the first time ever, urging the seasonal flu vaccine on everyone in the country, from six months’ of age until death.
Even more disturbing, the CDC withheld data on miscarriages from the H1N1 vaccines under Gerberding’s lead, while insisting that pregnant women be put first in line to receive it. This was a dramatic reversal of its own recommendations. More than 3,500 post-vaccination miscarriages may have simply been ignored by the CDC.
One of Merck’s potentially most dangerous vaccines right now is Gardasil; a vaccine that so far has been linked to thousands of adverse events and at least 49 unexplained deaths. It’s a situation that the FDA and CDC have repeatedly denied, even as the adverse reports mount.
Gerberding’s 2004 report to Congress, ‘Prevention of Genital Human Papillomavirus Infection’3 likely played a significant role in getting the controversial vaccine approved in the first place. Needless to say, the approval of this questionable vaccine guaranteed her future employer billions of dollars-worth of profits. Gerberding has also been a staunch defender of thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative used in many vaccines, and has consistently denied any links between vaccines and autism.
All in all, Gerberding has repeatedly demonstrated that safety is nowhere on her list of priorities or concerns when it comes to vaccines. It’s easy to see why Merck would want her to head up their vaccine unit. For the rest of us, however, her blatant disregard for proven vaccine safety is bad news indeed.

Former NIH Director Now Heads Sanofi Research Labs

Another former government official who’s switched sides is Elias Zerhouni, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—one of the world’s foremost medical research centers, and an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Zerhouni is now head of Sanofi-Aventis’ research labs4. He also is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine; a member of the Board of Trustees at the Mayo Clinic; and is a senior fellow for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program5.
As pointed out in a recent article by Forbes Magazine6, Zerhouni is no stranger to controversies over conflicts-of-interest.
In the fall of 2003, the NIH with Zerhouni at its head faced grave accusations when it came to light that hundreds of its scientists had financial ties to the medical and pharmaceutical industries. According to a 2004 article in the NIH Record7, over 100 scientists did not get approval for their industry activities, even though the rules were so loose virtually all requests to conduct outside work were approved by the agency, without any limits on compensation or hours worked for outside entities.
In one case, an academic scientist was found to have a financial interest in a therapy that ended up killing a patient. The case served as a potent warning of how dangerous such conflicts of interest can be. While Zerhouni managed to emerge from the 2003 debacle looking like a good crisis manager, the following paragraphs from the NIH Record8 are quite telling. Essentially, Zerhouni dissuaded Congress from doing the right thing, which is ban all outside activities of those working for the NIH, limiting the restrictions for conflicts of interest to upper level management only:

“[Zerhouni] disclosed that “initially, Congress truly wanted to ban [all outside activities], and the members of the committee have been very public about that…I was fortunate to be able to make contact with legislators and to help them understand what happened, how it happened, and why [a draconian response] might not be the right thing to do.”
Zerhouni said that over the course of long discussion, a good consensus emerged that formed the basis of NIH’s approach to the issue: stewards of public funds should never be vulnerable even to the perception that their activities could result in private gain. The top concern, he said, is, “How do you keep a true firewall and separation between the public trust — the money the public has given us in trust — and the activities of those who manage that resource?”
He doesn’t think it was well appreciated outside of NIH that the agency “has a dual nature — number one, we are a granting agency, but number two, we are also one of the most advanced, most capable biomedical research institutions in the world.
So we’re both sort of an academic, scientific research place, and yet next to that we’re also a government agency with its own rules and regulations…I said, look, we need to build a firewall around those who have fiduciary responsibility relative to the government, and those who do not. And that’s where we came up with these much more stringent rules for directors, deputy directors, and people who have those authorities, versus those who do not.”

Conflicts of Interest Affect Your Life and Well-Being…

When it comes to medicine, mere disclosure of conflict of interest is not nearly enough. Patients need unbiased advice when it comes to making decisions that can impact their very life, and physicians and scientists with financial ties to the drug industry should not be allowed to participate in broad policy and public-health recommendations in the first place. Likewise, while it’s perfectly legal to engage the revolving door and switch jobs from government agencies to private industry and vice-versa, this practice has become so widespread it has undermined the entire system of checks and balances.
Conflict of interest is rampant not only within the field of medicine, but the revolving doors between government and industry has effectively led to a situation where it’s now extremely difficult, if not impossible, to trust conventional health advice from the federal government—which is supposed to be independent due to this massive collusion between government and industry. Here are a few more examples of the many revolving doors between the pharmaceutical industry and the US government:

The American Cancer Society has close financial ties to both makers of mammography equipment and cancer drugs. Other conflicts of interest include ties to, and financial support from, the pesticide, petrochemical, biotech, cosmetics, and junk food industries—the very industries whose products are the primary contributors to cancer
Drug companies pay seven-figure amounts into FDA coffers to gain approval of their drugs. FDA staff knows that the cash means higher salaries and more perks in the agency budget. (Incidentally, the FDA’s commissioner Margaret Hamburg came straight from the boardroom of America’s largest seller of dental amalgam, Henry Schein, Inc.)
Conflicts of interest are also rampant in a mass vaccination infrastructure that has the same people who are regulating and promoting vaccines also evaluating vaccine safety.
The vaccine industry gives millions for conferences, grants, and medical education classes sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The vaccine industry even helped build AAP’s headquarters.
President Obama’s nominee at the Department of Homeland Security overseeing bioterrorism defense, Dr. Tara O’Toole, served as a key advisor for a lobbying group funded by a pharmaceutical company that asked the government to spend more money for anthrax vaccines and biodefense research9

There are countless others—so many, in fact, I’m sure you could fill an entire book with examples. These types of blatant conflicts should simply not be tolerated, but they most certainly are. For now the majority still does not understand the pharmaceutical industry’s power and influence over government, and the field of conventional medicine itself, but the tide is beginning to turn, and will continue to do so as more and more people get informed.

What Can You do to Take Control of Your Health?

The good news is that increasing numbers of people are now waking up to these harsh realities, and you, being among those who are informed, can help share this knowledge with others. Remember that the definition of fascism is a government system that has complete power in regimenting all industry and forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism. What we have here is a hybrid—a sort of corporate fascism, where industry has powerful control over government, and forcefully suppresses anything that threatens their monopoly on profits.
Unfortunately, this can be extremely dangerous as it pertains to your health.
Virtually every measurable index indicates that despite the ever-increasing amounts of money invested, if you live in the United States your chance of achieving optimal health through the medical system is only getting worse. While the U.S. spends more than twice the amount on health care as other developed nations, we rank 49th in life expectancy worldwide—far lower than most other developed nations! The time is ripe for you to take control of your health, and this site is full of free comprehensive recommendations that can serve as an excellent, truly independent starting point.
When it comes to your health, you simply cannot accept claims at their face value … you’ve got to dig below the surface and use all the resources available to you, including your own commonsense and reason, true independent experts’ advice and other’s experiences, to determine what medical treatment or advice will be best for you in any given situation. Ultimately, you must come to the realization that YOU are responsible for your, and your family’s health — not me, not your physician, and certainly not any researchers or government health agencies on a drug or vaccine manufacturer’s payroll.
You’ve got to become an active participant in your care and make sure you are making decisions that correspond with your own best judgment, knowledge and experiences.

By Dr. Mercola

It’s been nearly 15 years since we started this journey together, when, in 1997, I combined my two primary passions in life ― health and technology― and made it my mission to share exciting new developments in natural health with you. 
Thanks to you, this site has become the world’s No. 1-ranked Natural Health web site for the last seven years, and is now approaching nearly two million subscribers.
My motivation has always been to help make you as healthy as you can possibly be by sharing knowledge and simple tools that allow you to Take Control of Your Health. This involves:

Providing up to date natural health information, research and resources, and
Exposing corporate, government, and mass media propaganda that diverts you away from what is truly best for your health

Mercola.com is funded by me personally, and therefore, I am not handcuffed to any advertisers, silent partners or corporate parents. This gives me the freedom to report the facts as I see them, and base my recommendations on the available research and input from experts, without having to appease advertisers with conflicting interests.
When I offer or recommend products, I do so because I have actively researched them and find they are the best in that category for your health. I ignore substandard products, and products not directly pertinent to your health, regardless of any potential financial upside. I have a top-notch research- and development team to help me in this process.
Through the years the interest for products has grown into a full-fledged online store with well-researched and independently tested health products of the highest quality. Profit generated from the sale of my products goes right back into maintaining and building a better site and providing you with more free tools, videos, special reports, and in-depth articles.

About My Background

For those of you who are unfamiliar with my background, I was trained and am licensed as an osteopathic physician, also known as a DO. DOs are,similar to MDs; they can prescribe medication and perform surgery in all 50 states. DOs and MDs have similar training requiring four years of study in the basic and clinical sciences, and the successful completion of licensing exams.
For 25 years I treated over 25,000 patients and have loads of real world clinical experience to base my comments on how to avoid drugs and surgery using inexpensive natural approaches. I was also a paid speaker for a major drug company when I first started out so I have been to the dark side, and know firsthand how it works..
I am also board-certified in family medicine and served as the chairman of the family medicine department at St. Alexius Medical Center. I am trained in both traditional and natural medicine.
Believe it or not, when I opened my practice in 1985, my philosophy was very traditional. Like most doctors, I focused on treating people’s symptoms rather than addressing the root cause of their illness, so I prescribed drugs most of the time. I was even paid to lecture other doctors about the benefits of hormone replacement therapy. However, my interest in exercise and natural health grew, and in the early 90’s, I became increasingly focused on finding more natural ways to treat my patients.
A bit to my surprise, I quickly discovered I had much greater success getting people healthy this way, compared to the drug therapies I’d prescribed in the past.
By the time I quit seeing patients in order to dedicate my time to this newsletter, I’d already helped tens of thousands of patients address their health problems. I decided I could leverage my insights and help educate many more people on how to take back control of their health through this newsletter than I ever could seeing patients one-by-one. It was a decision I’ve never regretted, and I’m continually gratified by letters and feedback from readers who report feeling better than they’ve ever felt before as a result of their implementing the lifestyle changes.
In November 2009, I was named the top Ultimate Wellness Game Changer by the Huffington Post, an honor that celebrates “100 innovators, visionaries, and leaders in 10 categories who are harnessing the power of new media to reshape their fields and change the world.” Huffington Post readers voted me to the top to receive this special award. Two of my books, The Great Bird Flu Hoax and The No-Grain Diet, have also gone on to become New York Times Bestsellers.

Milestones Along the Way…

We’ve made many changes at Mercola.com since our humble beginnings in 1997. We’ve gone from sending out a newsletter once a week, to providing in-depth articles on a daily basis, and over the years we’ve helped pave the way in demanding transparency in FDA actions, and exposed the realities of how many health programs are intricately tied to Big Pharma, and the revolving doors existing between government and big industries and corporations like Monsanto and Merck.
We’ve reached tremendous milestones during this 15-year journey, and have consistently shared the news well before the mainstream. Examples of topics we’ve been frontrunners of include:

Exposing the swine flu pandemic for the hoax that it was. That article ended up being among the top five pages viewed on the entire internet the day we posted it, and it crashed all our servers.
Exposing Merck’s drug, Vioxx, for the killer that it was, years before major media started reporting it. I actually issued the first public warning about Vioxx while it was still in clinical trials—a year before it became available by prescription.
Warning about the emergence of statin drugs, which I stated were an accident waiting to happen. My first warnings were issued 11 years ago, in 2001. Fast-forward to a decade later and the truth of this has become quite evident, and the dangers of statins are now well-documented.
I’ve long warned of the dangers of routine mammograms, and in the past couple of years, a number of studies have emerged showing that mammograms appear to do more harm than good, and are not, in fact, saving women’s lives.
Educating about the health benefits of vitamin D and safe sun exposure, and the many benefits of astaxanthin

Health Liberty

Last year we founded the Health Liberty initiative, with a call for you to join me in standing up for your right to control your health.  Today, government and Big Pharma, as well as other multinational corporations like Monsanto, want to take away that right. With our new Health Liberty initiative, we’ve let government and public health agencies know that our bodies belong to us.
The government does not own our bodies, and we don’t want―or need―mandates or Big Brother operatives working hand-in-hand with huge corporations dictating our lives. To that end, through the Health Liberty Initiative, I let you know, last year, that I’m putting my money where my mouth is with an investment of a minimum of a million dollars toward several major health liberty goals:

To abolish the use of mercury in dentistry.
To get the toxic poison fluoride removed from our water systems.
To provide an objective voice of common sense that is lacking from the media and public health officials and educate the public about vaccines; to demand the right to informed consent when it comes to vaccines, and to insist on the freedom to choose whether or not we even want to be vaccinated.
To fight for the right to know and the labeling of genetically engineered foods.

You’ve been a huge help in this last project. Many of you responded to our call for donations to the Money Bomb Against Monsanto, and your donations will help carry on the fight for the labeling of genetically modified foods in California. We believe the California ballot initiative will have the same effect as an FDA regulation when it is passed this November, and be the beginning of the end of genetically engineered foods in the US.
This is one of the most important, if not the most important health freedom project we’ve embarked on since I started this site and I thank you for being part of it.
The movement to demand labeling of genetically modified foods in the U.S. is an absolute necessity. We need to label these foods just like they are labeled in other countries. India, for example, just decided to label genetically modified foods as of January of next year. The Millions Against Monsanto was a start. We are fighting for the right to know what’s in our food. 

My Deepest Thanks to YOU!

Because of your loyal support, we’ve slowly but surely awakened the world to the false promises of the fatally flawed conventional medical view, which claims disease is best treated with drugs, and that the government knows what’s best for your health and should be allowed to dictate your health options.
That model is a prescription for disaster for personal health and freedom.
The truth is, it’s health that counts―and the freedom to choose health over treating symptoms of disease will always be our goal. So it’s with great excitement and hope for the future that I promise you my team and I will continue educating and creating awareness to allow you to make your own informed health choices.
Most of all, after 15 years, I am really excited to see the community that has been created, and I want to personally thank YOU for being here and continuing to be part of the revolution that succeeds when we can All TRULY take control of our own health.

15th Anniversary Special

Many of the changes to this web site have occurred in response to requests and suggestions from you, and I encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and ideas for how to make it even better as we move forward.
For example, my online store grew in response to your requests for an easy and safe method to purchase high quality health products over the Internet that have been carefully vetted and independently tested.  Mercola.com evolved to give you just that―an online health products store that you can trust. In the next few weeks we will announce yet another significant partnership and milestone that will make your online shopping even more convenient.
To celebrate these first 15 years together, we’re extending a special Anniversary offer to all of you. Just spend $50 or more in our online store beginning August 2, and ending at midnight on August 8, and receive 15% off your entire order. Retail Customers must enter Promotional Code 15ANNIV to recieve the discount.  Premier Customers must enter Promotional Code PRM15YR to receive the discount. (Please note that this sale does not apply to wholesale customers.)

By Dr. Mercola

Probiotics, along with a host of other microorganisms, are so crucial to your health that researchers have compared them to “a newly recognized organ.” In fact, your microflora – a term used to describe the bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microbes that make up your microbial inner ecosystem – impact far more than your digestive tract.
Mounting research indicate the bacterial colonies residing in your gut may play key roles in the development of cancer, asthma, allergies, obesity, diabetes, autoimmune diseases and even brain-, behavioral- and emotional problems like ADHD, autism and depression.
Recent research also shows that your diet, and subsequently the microorganisms present in your gut, can affect how well you age.
The study was published in the journal Nature1, and some of the findings were surprising: the microflora in persons in long-term care not only was less diverse, but significantly correlated with measures of frailty, co-morbidity, markers of inflammation and other factors that contribute to aging and death. According to the authors, the implications of these findings are that senior citizens may need certain dietary supplements to improve their microbial health.

Probiotics Become Increasingly Important as You Age

Previous research has shown that around age 60, there is a significant drop in the number of bacteria in your gut. According to Dr Sandra McFarlane from the microbiology and gut biology group at the University of Dundee, people over 60 typically have about 1,000-fold less “friendly” bacteria in their guts compared to younger adults, and increased levels of disease-causing microbes2, making them more susceptible to gastrointestinal infections and bowel conditions like IBS.
As you age, your cellular immunity also declines.3 These are the white cells that are absolutely critical to your ability to fight infection and life-threatening diseases such as cancer. A nine-week long New Zealand study4 of seniors between the ages of 63 and 84 found that consumption of the probiotic strain known as Bifidobacterium lactis resulted in increases in both the number and disease-fighting capacity of white cells. In fact, the greatest improvement was seen in seniors with the worst immune system responses prior to the study.

Your Gut Bacteria Help Protect Against Food-Borne Illness

Other recent research has found that Lactobaccilus reuteri, one of the more than 180 species of Lactobacilli, commonly found in the human gut, can help protect against foodborne infection5. However, just because a study has not been done with a particular strain does not mean it is not effective.  These studies need to be paid for and most are not done unless there is a potential to commercialize a strain.  Nevertheless, according to an article in the Arizona State University news blog:

“Their results demonstrate that this beneficial or probiotic organism, which produces an antimicrobial substance known as reuterin, may protect intestinal epithelial cells from infection by the foodborne bacterial pathogen Salmonella. The study examines for the first time the effect of reuterin during the infection process of mammalian intestinal cells and suggests the efficacy of using probiotic bacteria or their derivatives in future therapies aimed at thwarting Salmonella infection.
… The results of this study may provide fundamental knowledge for development of new probiotics and other functional food based strategies… Intestinal infections by non-typhoidal Salmonella strains induce diarrhea and gastroenteritis, and remain a leading source of foodborne illness worldwide. Such infections are acutely unpleasant but self-limiting in healthy individuals. For those with compromised immunity however, they can be deadly and the alarming incidence of multi-drug resistant Salmonella strains has underlined the necessity of more effective therapeutics.
The use of benign microorganisms offers a promising new approach to treating infection from pathogens like Salmonella and indeed, L. reuteri has been shown to help protect against gastrointestinal infection and reduce diarrhea in children.”

Remember, 90 Percent of the Genetic Material in Your Body is NOT Yours

For every cell in your body there are about ten bacterial cells. The microflora in your gut plays an active role in a wide variety of diseases, and, naturally, it stands to reason they affect your health status throughout your life. For the reasons mentioned above, the importance of probiotics increase with advancing age, but maintaining a healthy gut is really essential from birth onward.
If you want to dig into the research, check out the Human Microbiome Project (HMP)6, whose goal is to characterize microbial communities found at multiple human body sites and to look for correlations between changes in the microbiome and human health. There you can find 15 demonstration projects investigating the role of microflora and conditions like psoriasis, Crohn’s disease, obesity, acne and more. A recent article in The Hindu quotes Dr. Julie Segre, senior investigator at the U S National Institute of Health7:

“The Microbiome project is a process of discovery. We need to start thinking of ourselves as super-organisms. This is the second genome – the bacterial genomes as well as the human genomes, all of that is part of the true genetic content of a human.”
… The hope is that this research will pave the way for more personalized treatments which could help get our bacterial communities get back on the right track. The Microbiome project sees any one person’s microbes as one community. So rather than studying them individually, they are studying the microbes and their genetic material collectively.”

Microbes Affect Your Health in a Myriad of Ways

Researchers have also discovered that your gut bacteria play key roles in:

Behavior: A study published in Neurogastroenterology & Motility8 found that mice lacking in gut bacteria behave differently from normal mice, engaging in what would be referred to as “high-risk behavior.” This altered behavior was accompanied by neurochemical changes in the mouse brain. According to the authors:

“Bacteria colonize the gut in the days following birth, during a sensitive period of brain development, and apparently influence behavior by inducing changes in the expression of certain genes.”

Gene Expression: Your gut flora is a very powerful epigenetic variable. As noted above, researchers have also discovered that the absence or presence of gut microorganisms during infancy permanently alters gene expression.
Through gene profiling, they discerned that absence of gut bacteria altered genes and signaling pathways involved in learning, memory, and motor control. This suggests that gut bacteria are closely tied to early brain development and subsequent behavior. These behavioral changes could be reversed as long as the mice were exposed to normal microorganisms early in life. But once the germ-free mice had reached adulthood, colonizing them with bacteria did not influence their behavior.
In a similar way, probiotics have also been found to influence the activity of hundreds of your genes, helping them to express in a positive, disease-fighting manner.
Diabetes: Bacterial populations in the gut of diabetics9 differ from non-diabetics, according to a study from Denmark. In particular, diabetics had fewer Firmicutes and more plentiful amounts of Bacteroidetes and Proteobacteria, compared to non-diabetics. The study also found a positive correlation for the ratios of Bacteroidetes to Firmicutes and reduced glucose tolerance. According to the authors: “The results of this study indicate that type 2 diabetes in humans is associated with compositional changes in intestinal microbiota.”

Sugar nourishes pathogenic bacteria, yeast, and fungi in your gut, which may actually harm you more than its ability to promote insulin resistance.  One of the major results of eating a healthy diet (low in sugars and grains; high in whole raw foods and fermented or cultured foods) is that it allows your beneficial gut bacteria to flourish, and they secondarily perform the real “magic” of restoring your health. There are other studies that show optimized gut flora can help prevent type 1 diabetes.
Autism: 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 are particularly at risk for developing disorders such as ADHD, learning disabilities and autism, particularly if they are vaccinated before restoring balance to their gut flora.
To get a solid understanding of just how this connection works, I highly recommend reviewing the information shared by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride in this previous interview.

Download Interview Transcript
Obesity: The make-up of gut bacteria tends to differ in lean vs. obese people. This is one of the strongest areas of probiotic research to date, and you can read about a handful of such studiesin my previous article, Probiotics May Help Fight Obesity. The bottom line is that restoring your gut flora is an important consideration if you’re struggling to lose weight. Studies have also documented the beneficial effects of probiotics on a wide variety of disorders, including the following10:

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
Constipation and diarrhea

Colon cancer
Eradication of H. pylori infection, which is associated with ulcers
Vaginal infections

Strengthened immune response
Eczema
Rheumatoid arthritis

Cirrhosis of the liver
Hepatic encephalopathy
Chronic fatigue syndrome

How to Optimize Your Gut Flora

A healthy diet is the ideal way to maintain a healthy gut, and regularly consuming traditionally fermented or cultured foods is the easiest way to ensure optimal gut flora. Healthy options include:

Fermented vegetables of all kinds  (cabbage, carrots, kale, collards, celery spiced with herbs like ginger and garlic)
Lassi (an Indian yogurt drink, traditionally enjoyed before dinner)
Tempeh

Fermented raw milk such as kefir or yogurt, but NOT commercial versions, which typically do not have live cultures and are loaded with sugars that feed pathogenic bacteria
Natto
Kim chee

 
Just make sure to steer clear of pasteurized versions, as pasteurization will destroy many of the naturally occurring probiotics. For example, most of the “probiotic” yogurts you find in every grocery store these days are NOT recommended. Since they’re pasteurized, they will be associated with all of the problems of pasteurized milk products instead. They also typically contain added sugars, high fructose corn syrup, dyes, and/or artificial sweeteners; all of which are detrimental to your health.
Consuming traditionally fermented foods will also provide you with the following added boons:

Important nutrients: Some fermented foods are excellent sources of essential nutrients such as vitamin K2, which is important for preventing arterial plaque buildup and heart disease. Cheese curd, for example, is an excellent source of both probiotics and vitamin K2. You can also obtain all the K2 you’ll need (about 200 micrograms) by eating 15 grams, or half an ounce, of natto daily. They are also a potent producer of many B vitamins
Optimizing your immune system: Probiotics have been shown to modulate immune responses via your gut’s mucosal immune system, and have anti-inflammatory potential. Eighty percent of your immune system is located in your digestive system, making a healthy gut a major focal point if you want to maintain optimal health, as a robust immune system is your number one defense system against ALL disease
Detoxification: Fermented foods are some of the best chelators available. The beneficial bacteria in these foods are very potent detoxifiers, capable of drawing out a wide range of toxins and heavy metals
Cost effective: Fermented foods can contain 100 times more probiotics than a supplement, so just adding a small amount of fermented foods to each meal will give you the biggest bang for your buck
Natural variety of microflora: As long as you vary the fermented and cultured foods you eat, you’ll get a much wider variety of beneficial bacteria than you could ever get from a supplement

How to Identify a High Quality Probiotic Supplement

That said, if you don’t enjoy the taste of fermented foods, taking a probiotic supplement is definitely advised. However, before you give up on fermented foods, it is best to start with small amounts like half a teaspoon and use them as a condiment integrated with your food, like as a salad dressing.  If you still don’t want to use them then it is important to note that while I do not generally advocate taking a lot of supplements, a high quality probiotic is an exception. I recommend looking for a probiotic supplement that fulfills the following criteria, to ensure quality and efficacy:

The bacteria strains in the product must be able to survive your stomach acid and bile, so that they reach your intestines alive in adequate numbers
The bacteria strains must have health-promoting features
The probiotic activity must be guaranteed throughout the entire production process, storage period and shelf life of the product

Through my years of clinical practice, I’ve found that no single probiotic supplement works for everyone. However, more people seem to respond favorably to Lactobacillus sporogenes than any other probiotic, so when in doubt, that’s a great place to start.

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.”

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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.