Monday, May 23, 2011

We will sorely miss Dr. Wendy Kagan Snyder


Today was one of the toughest days I've every experienced watching a beautiful and loving mother, wife, daughter, sister and friend buried after losing her battle to Lyme disease. Who knew how debilitating a mis-diagnosis of Lyme Disease could be!

Wendy is pictured above teaching a class about healthy living. Unfortunately, that's not enough.

I urge you to learn more about Lyme disease at http://turnthecorner.org/content/learn-about-lyme and please donate generously.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Bill Maher on health and wellness!


Can good health be boiled down to such a simple equation as:

Health = Nutrient Rich Food + Exercise + Stress Mgmt

The answer, according to many esteemed medical schools such as Duke, Harvard and UMich and many others, is YES!

The problem is that the pharmaceutical companies have convinced us that meds lead to good health.

As Bill Maher says in this provocative clip (link below), "If you believe you have to take all the pills the pharmaceutical companies say you do, then you're already on drugs."

Maher continues, "There is no money in healthy or dead people: The money is in the middle, people who are alive, sort of, but with one or more chronic conditions that puts them in need of (medications)."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot6x7cx9f7k&feature=player_embedded

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Sugar even in sushi rice? Really!


I was astounded to hear how much sugar is added to sushi rice at a recent presentation I attended by a top Sushi in Boston. He recommended to add 1/4 cup sugar to 4 cups of rice. I had always thought of sushi as a relatively healthy food, but this revelation made me think twice.

I have been particularly sensitive to the poison of sugar after watching Dr. Robert Lustig's lecture, "Sugar: The Bitter Truth," on YouTube. As I wrote in the JOOS newsletter, it's worth the highly educational 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.

Find out why there are epidemic rates of obese 6-month olds!

Friday, May 13, 2011

Improve Digestion + Reduce Stress = Decrease Cholesterol


Stress and poor digestion raise cholesterol levels. Simply put, high levels of stress and/or poor digestion ultimately cause free radicals that damage the healthy cholesterol (the LDLs) and they, in turn, irritate the arteriole wall. This causes the cholesterol to clump and accumulate causing arteriole disease, as shown in the picture above.

Meditation is an excellent way to reduce the stress, but with our busy schedules, many of us find it difficult to find the time.

We need to make certain that our bodies have the ability to detoxify well, which is why it is especially crucial for all of us busy people to nourish our bodies with the highest quality, nutrient rich foods.

JOOS to the rescue!

JOOS is an alkalizing beverage, which neutralizes the free radicals and improves our digestion, enabling a healthy detoxification of our systems.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

The Battle of the Sodas: Why do you drink poison?


Studies are coming out showing the correlation between drinking soda and heart disease, stroke and other diseases. The link below is a study by one of the researchers, Dr. Mitchell Elkind of Columbia Medical School, who stated, “What our study shows is that drinking diet soda may be associated with an increased risk of vascular events, by which we mean strokes, heart attacks, and other causes of death that can be due to vascular disease.”

While diet soda doesn't pack on the weight as does non diet soda, it is still filled with artificial ingredients that can wreck havoc on our systems and interfere with all of our metabolic (that is digestive) processes in our bodies.

What bothers me greatly and what I find so irresponsible is, with so many studies showing the ills of drinking soda, then why aren't medical doctors warning their patients? The fact is, most of them don't know. You know the phrase, "buyer beware?" Well, this time, it's "patient beware!"

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/02/09/diet-soda-linked-to-higher-risk-of-heart-attack-stroke/

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

The 3 Simplist Rules to reading labels that could save your children's health


Yesterday I was at a friend's home and she showed me the label of a muffin product that she thought was healthy. On the box, it read,"healthier than eating an apple," which in itself is a warning. As we read the label, there were countless ingredients that were barely readable, another big warning.

These foods can make us sick!

I take my children food shopping as often as possible because this is the best way they can learn how to eat foods that make their bodies strong.

Here are the 3 simplest rules to reading ingredients:

1. Stay away from foods with labels that say "high fructose corn syrup" and "trans fat" because those ingredients are poison.

2. If the ingredient list is long or if there are ingredients with names they are unable to read, there's probably a lot of chemical additives in the product, which means they could be risking their health by eating it.

3. Ingredients are listed on the label according to quantity, so if corn syrup is the first item, chances are that is not a healthy food.

What do you look for when reading a label?