Ingredients of Health

The common ingredients of health and long
life are:
Great temp'rance, open air,
Easy labor, little care. - Sir P. Sidney

Healthy Thought For the Day

We are what we repeatedly do. - Aristotle

Preventing Back Pain When You Have to Sit at a Desk All Day

Back pain is one of the most common reasons why people visit the doctor. It is especially challenging to keep your back in shape when you sit at a desk all day long. Our bodies were designed to be outside picking berries, fishing, and walking miles to look for shelter, not sitting stationary and reading email for hours on end.

Yoga can help to get all of your major muscles groups moving and strengthened. Watching your posture is also importent. If you sit hunched over a PC all day long, eventually your muscles may shorten into that position. Then when you need to stretch out your body for an activity like tennis or even reaching for a something on a high shelf, your back may "go out". The best way to prevent this is to keep your muscles flexible and aligned even before you have pain. Practicing yoga regularly and watching your posture may help.

Veggies for Asthma?

A study published in the journal Thorax found that women who ate the most tomatoes, carrots and leafy green vegetables had lower asthma rates. It is important to note that this study showed association, and not cause and effect. Women who eat a lot of veggies may have other healthy habits that lower their asthma rates. However, since no other fruits or vegetables were significantly associated with asthma prevalence, the study authors concluded that these results suggest that the intake of some vegetables may decrease the prevalence of adult asthma.

Coffee and Heart Attacks

This article from Yahoo News notes that people who are "slow caffeine metabolizers" are more likely to have a nonfatal heart attack if they drink two cups of coffee or more a day. In this study the researchers believed the ability to metabolize coffee is a genetic trait. The authors stated that there is no commercially available test to see if your body metabolizes caffeine well.

This is interesting because there are alternative health tests to see how well phase one of you liver detoxification process is working that involve a caffeine challenge test. In alternative health, caffeine processing is generally thought not to rely mostly on genetics but on how well your liver is working. In holistic medicine, how well your liver is working is thought to depend upon factors such as exposure to chemicals and toxins, proper diet, etc.

The truth about people who are slow caffeine metabolizers probably lies somewhere in between environmental, genetic and dietary factors. I can tolerate more caffeine when I'm eating healthier, but never more than a cup or so at most. Yet I know some people who can drink coffee all day long and not seem to have any side effects from it.

Study Shows Limited Benefits From Calcium

Yet, another urban myth of modern medicine bites the dust. Many alternative health experts have questioned the wisdom of women automatically taking calcium supplements for years, only to be dismissed by conventional medical doctors. Now a recent study validates that there may be a only very limited benefit for women's bone health from taking calcium and vitamin D supplements.

BioPiracy: Drug Companies Hop on the Herbal Bandwagon

If you can't beat them, file a patent to use against them.

Multinational drug companies are now beginning to see the value in herbal and nutritional medicine. That part is good. The bad news is that they are trying to patent centuries old traditional herbal cures to prevent other companies from marketing them.

Fat Helps with Nutrient Absorption

A study from 2004 shows that eating some fat with salads actually increases vitamin absorption, while eating vegetables without any fat reduces absorption rates of nutrients.

I've suspected this for years from trial and error because of my diet changes. If I eat a very low fat diet, I get edgy and my fibromyalgia returns, so I thought this was because I just wasn't getting enough nutrition from low fat diets.

I've been trying to lose weight lately, but I'd rather be a little overweight than in constant pain. So anyway now I'm trying to cut out high glycemic foods and any empty calories foods instead of fat. So far that seems to be working better for me than eating low fat.

Feeding Minds - The impact of food on mental health

A new report from The Mental Health charity of the U.K. along with Sustain, the alliance for better farming and food, highlights the impact of nutrition poor diets on mental health. Basically, it goes back to we are what we eat, and this include the human brain. The human brain is made fromthe foods you eat. Is you brain made from carrots, asparagus, cashews and salmon, or lattes, Doritos, hamburgers and pizza?

The report blames highly processed, trans fat laden, nutrition poor convenience foods with the rise in mental health issues in the U.K. The authors of the report believe that modern diets have reduced the amounts of essential fatty acids, amino acids vitamins and minerals in our foods. Since the brain is basically made from particular types of fats and vitamins and minerals, a lack of these can result in poor brain function. The result can be disorders such as Add, depression, memory loss and anxiety.

If you have been reading alternative health books over the last ten years, this report has absolutely nothing new in it. What is significant is that one of the coauthors of the report is a leading mental health nonprofit in the UK, which means that the alternative health ideas are becoming more accepted by mainstream groups.

Exercise Alleviates Depression

I think this just proves what many people interested in alternative health have known for a long time - that exercise is good for both your body and mind. While I'm not against mental health counseling, I think all too often people are given drugs and talk therapy, when their basic problem is they may not be getting enough healthy food, sunshine and exercise in the fresh air. Anyone is going to be depressed if he or she sits inside all day with the drapes drawn and eats nothing but junk food.

In one of my alternative health books there is a story of a woman who was put on anti-anxiety drugs while she was drinking 12 cups of coffee a day! Most people would be anxiety prone if they drank that much coffee. In this case the woman didn't really need drugs as much as she needed nutritional counseling.

Nutrition and Multiple Sclerosis

A number of people who come to my connective tissue disorder site also have symptoms of multiple sclerosis. A few years ago one of my neighbors was telling me about her MS symptoms, and there seemed to be a lot of overlap with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

So I did some research on Pubmed and found many nutritional deficiencies linked to MS, and interestingly many of the symptoms of MS are also linked to nutritional deficiencies. It's unfortunate that these studies are not made widely available to the general public. Researchers seem to want to focus on a single cause for MS like there is for chicken pox, but the evidence indicates that MS isn't caused by a virus at all. Malabsorption, low body weight and nutritional deficiencies are a common and pervasive theme in much of the MS research.

Magnesium deficiency seems to be common in MS as well as many symptoms of EDS, so that might explain some of the overlaps.

One really interesting point about MS is that is seems to be mutually exclusive with gout. Since we know the diet people need to have to avoid gout (one low in uric acid forming foods) then it would be logical to consider that a diet high in uric acid forming foods would be good for MS.

Tics, Tourettes Syndrome, and Magnesium Deficiency

I just added a new page to my Connective Tissue Disorder site on tics. My sons have mentioned kids at school with odd tics, eye blinking and assorted involuntary movements. So it prompted me to write about my own experiences with one of my children and facial tics. For a while, when one of my sons was around four years old, he had facial tics and weird eye blinking that was getting worse and worse. I was very worried he was going to end up diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome. I ended up finding out that tics could be caused by a magnesium deficiency. So we changed his diet to get more magnesium and within a few days he was fine. I see so many people these days with facial tics and other involuntary movements and I do wonder if some of them might also be helped my some relatively simple diet changes. In my sons case I think one of the main culprits was that I thought I was helping my kids by giving them multivitamins and fortified foods. However, it turns out that many fortified foods do not contain magnesium, and to make matters worse, they often contain magnesium antagonists. So add that kind of a diet to a family history of issues with magnesium deficiency and the diet I thought was healthy for my kids was actually causing them more harm than good.

Sham Acupuncture as Helpful as Real Acupuncture for Migraines

In my experience, acupuncture didn't help any of my headhache or other pain problems at all. As such, I found the above link interesting. In my main web site I made a list of alternative treatments I found helpful for all of my connective tissue disorder issues, including headaches.

The helpful treatments included diet changes, yoga, and Ayurvedic medicine. Treatments I personally did not find helpful for either myself or my family included homeopathy and acupuncture.

Homeopathy No Better Than Placebo - Study

A recent paper published in the Lancet cliams that homeopathy works no better than placebos at treating illness. I would tend to agree with those conclusions. I've never been a fan of homeopathy so I can't say I was sorry to see these headlines today. I find it unfortunate that homeopathy gets thrown along with proven therapies such as nutrition and exercise when people talk about alternative health treatments. For more information on my experience, see my web site pages page on my experience with homeopathy.

I took my some to a homeopathic doctor out of sheer desperation one time when he had some unusual health issues our regular and even holistic doctors could not figure out. I spent a signifivant amount of time and money on the appointment and I thought it was a complete waste. The "remedy" never helped one bit.

Dangers of Teflon

"Scientific studies have found that Teflon's key chemical, linked to cancer and organ damage in laboratory animals, is in the blood of almost all Americans."

It is interesting to note that most alternative health experts have been recommending people avoid cooking with Teflon for years. At our house we try to use only stainless steal or glass for cooking foods.

Never Give Up on Your Health

I had an appointment at Kaiser today for some small skin imperfections I wanted checked out. We only switched to Kaiser in the past few years after my health had improved from adopting many of the diet and exercise changes outlined in my www.ctds.info site. My Kaiser doctor didn't know me at the time I was having severe bleeding issues, fibromyalgia, TMJ and many of the other issues listed in my connective tissue disorder site. She commented today at my appointment on how she rarely saw me and how few Kaiser resources I used compared to most of her other patients. It was pretty cool hearing that.

A few years ago I was going from specialist to specialist for all of my different health issues to hope to get a diagnosis, let alone a cure for everything that was wrong with me. There was actually a time when I was considering using a wheel chair. My husband and I also had been househ unting for a one story home because I was having trouble going up and down stairs in our two story house.

Well, after many hours of reseaching my health issues, a lot of diet changes and many hours of yoga, today I'm in pretty good shape. We ended up staying in the same house. Last year I bought an expensive mountain bike instead of a wheel chair.

So if you have unusual problems, even a supposedly incurable disorder like me, my advice is to never give up trying different doctors and searching for answers on your own. If I had not done my own health research, I might be in that wheel chair today instead of back on a bike.

Pfizer Suspends Bextra, Agrees to Warning on Celebrex - another drug solution bites the dust. Or as the famous quotes goes, "Some remedies are worse than the disease." ~ Publilius Syrus

Morgellons

I read an article in the paper the other day about a disorder called Morgellons and it just blew me away. My son and I had many of the same symptoms, though nothing as extreme. The part I found especially interesting was that people with the disorder all had weird fibers growing out of lesions on their bodies, yet most of them were being diagnosed with "delusional parasitis (DP)". It's the doctor's that are delusional in this case, and probably most others cases of DP, too. The doctors are at a loss to explain or treat the patients symptoms so they take a "the patient must be crazy approach". It does make me wonder about the logic skills of the medical profession as a whole. How can lesions in thousands of people, all complaining of the same symptoms, all with strange fibers growing out of their bodies, possibly attributed to delusion?

I have medical text books from the early 1900s and medical textbooks from recent times and there is very little overlap. Most of the diseases we have identified today did not have names or diagnostic criteria in the early 1900s. What are the odds that there will be many more diseases and infections in medical texts of a hundred years from now? Are all of the people who have disorders that are not in the current medical texts being diagnosed today as delusional? I worry that might be true. In the old medical books many disorders were attributed to "female hysteria"--conditons that would more likely be diagnosed as epilepsy today.

Link Between Multivitamins and Asthma

Recent research show a link between infant multivitamin use and asthma.

Researchers do not understand the reason for the link, but I have some thoughts....Mutlivitamins generally don't have any appreciable magnesium because it requires too much space to fit inside the pill or tablet. So they just leave the magnesium out. Yet this leaves the multivitamins with little or no magnesium, yet chalk-full of magnesium antagonists like iron and B vitamins. Since asthma in many people has been linked to a magnesium deficiency, this study makes a lot of sense to me. I stopped giving my kids multivitamins years ago when they were having health issues associated with magensium deficiency and other readers of my CTDS site have reported similar issues with their children.

Click here for more information on magnesium deficiency and asthma.

Failings of Modern Medicine

Click here to read Death by Medicine

An interesting and well referenced article on the failings of modern health care in the U.S. and the conflicts of interest in health resarch. Written by By Gary Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, PhD.

Do you think you are safe and in good hands when you enter a hospital these days? If so, this article may change your mind by citing the number of deaths and injuries caused by "modern" medical care.