In light of my recent "up close and personal" experience with heart attack, I wanted to share this enlightening article in the hope of persuading patients (especially my own brother) to think twice before following all the "politically correct" "diet dictocratic" recommendations.
What Causes Heart Attacks?
Written by Thomas Cowan, MD
May 1 2008
Read this article in: Spanish | Dutch
The kidneys nourish the heart.
-Traditional Chinese medical texts.
The story of how I came to understand the cause, and therefore the appropriate treatment, of acute coronary syndrome involves fascinating elements of surprise and serendipity. I thought it best, therefore, to describe how this tale unfolded for me.
Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) describes a constellation of illnesses that include angina (chest pain), unstable angina (basically bad chest pain) and myocardial infarction (otherwise known as heart attack or MI). These three illnesses form a continuum, with angina as the mildest symptom and heart attack—when there is actual death of the heart cells—as the most severe. The history of thought about this group of illnesses is both fascinating and controversial.
It seems that heart attacks were rare in this country until about the 1930s. The incidence of fatal MIs quickly increased from about 3,000 per year during that decade to almost half a million per year during the 1950s. In fact, mid century, this formerly rare disease had become the leading cause of death in the US. The incidence has risen continually since then until just recently, when it seems that the tide may be turning a bit and the incidence lessening, or at least leveling off. Nevertheless, after decades of reckless fiddling with the American diet as a way to prevent heart disease, almost a million Americans still die from heart disease each year.
The Conventional Theory
As you can imagine, when it became clear that we were suffering from an epidemic of this disease, physicians and cardiologists developed an intense interest in the cause and possible treatment of the disease. Around the late 1940s, the medical establishment proposed a simple and plausible explanation for MI, and this explanation soon became universally accepted.
The current thinking about heart attacks focuses on the blood supply to the myocardial (heart) cells from the network of coronary arteries, that is, the arteries that supply blood to the heart itself. There are four main arteries, each supplying blood to a different region of the heart. Medical experts believe that when one or more of these arteries gets blocked with plaque, a condition called atherosclerosis, then the inside of the artery becomes narrowed, the blood flow becomes compromised and, in times of myocardial stress (such as exercise or emotional trauma), the insufficient blood flow causes damage to the particular region of the heart fed by the blocked artery. This diminished blood flow first causes pain (angina) and then, if more severe, death to the heart tissue.
Here was an elegant and plausible theory. Voilà! Case closed. The only thing left to figure out was what was causing the arterial blockages. This answer was famously supplied by Dr. Ancel Keys in the 1950s. Keys fingered cholesterol as the culprit, claiming that excess cholesterol floating around in the blood built up as plaque in the arteries. For over fifty years the theory has survived without any significant changes. In fact, if someone has a heart attack today, we often call it a "coronary," referring to the presumed source of the problem, the coronary arteries.
This theory about the cause of heart attacks is so ingrained in our culture that until recently, even a medical skeptic like myself never really questioned it. My only issue with the theory centered on the material in the plaque, which research subsequently revealed to be mostly inflammatory debris, not cholesterol. But I never really gave any thought to the basic premise, namely, that blocked arteries cause heart attacks.
It should be mentioned that this theory about the cause of heart attacks has led to a massive industry devoted to its diagnosis and treatment. Angiograms (in which dye is injected into the vessels to see if they are blocked), bypasses, stents, angioplasties (like roto-rooters for blocked arteries), cholesterol- lowering drugs and lowfat, low-cholesterol diets are all based one hundred percent on the acceptance of blocked arteries as The Cause of acute coronary syndrome.
The whole debate in modern cardiology, both alternative and conventional, is how to stop the buildup of plaque or—more recently— how to prevent plaque in the arteries from breaking free and forming a clot, thereby completely blocking an artery already narrowed by the buildup.
The Digitalis Connection
Around two years ago I received an email from the son-in-law of a recently deceased and apparently well-known Brazilian cardiologist, Quintilaino H. de Mesquita. Before he died, Dr. Mesquita had published a summary of twentynine years of research carried out at his cardiology hospital, data on what he called the "true cause and effective treatment of MIs." His son-in-law and fellow researcher, Carlos Monteiro, emailed me a simple question, which was: "When you put your cancer patients on low-dose whole digitalis plant extract, does this lower their incidence of MIs?"
His question was actually a response to a series of articles describing the effectiveness of low-dose whole digitalis leaf extract in the treatment of a variety of cancers, which I had recently posted on my website, www.fourfoldhealing. com. I wrote back asking why he wanted to know this. He replied that in Dr. Mesquita's groundbreaking study on what he called the myogenic (that is, arising from the muscle) theory of heart disease, he had stumbled on an unexpected result: the digitalis they were using to treat MIs had also dramatically lowered the incidence of cancer in their heart patients, and mine was the only website they found that mentioned this association.
As I had never heard of either the myogenic theory or of the use of digitalis for heart attack, I asked what this was all about. His response was a box of articles and books all published over the last fifty years that seemed to refute the coronary blockage theory of MIs and support what he called the myogenic theory. I spent the next two months poring over these studies until I became convinced that this was perhaps the biggest medical news of the decade, maybe of the entire century.
The Myogenic Theory
Briefly, the myogenic theory of MIs states that:
The coronary obstruction theory does not adequately explain all the observed facts concerning MIs.
The major etiologic (cause and effect) factor in an MI is a destructive chemical process; specifically, in situations of stress on the myocardial (heart muscle) tissue, often as a result of small vessel disease, the myocardial tissue gets insufficient oxygen and nutrients. This leads to destructive lactic acidosis in the tissue which, if unchecked, leads to death of the myocardial cells. This process is largely unrelated to coronary artery disease.
The regular use of cardiotonics, primarily low-dose whole digitalis extracts or an extract of another herb called g-strophanthin, prevents this lethal acidosis and therefore prevents and corrects the true cause of this syndrome. The result is substantially lower morbidity and mortality from heart disease.
Let's look at some of the data supporting these three conclusions. First, does the coronary obstruction theory adequately explain the observed facts? Interestingly, in the 1940s and 1950s, when the coronary blockage theory was first proposed, the majority of cardiologists did not accept it. They pointed out that while coronary arteries are not the only arteries to have plaque, the only tissue to suffer from decreased blood flow during a heart attack is that of the heart. In other words, no one has a spleen attack or a kidney attack, yet the arteries feeding these organs also get plaque buildup.
Furthermore, the medical literature reveals some surprising findings. In a 1998 paper by Mirakami,1 the author found that of those with an acute MI, 49 percent had a blockage, 30 percent had no coronary blockage, 14 percent had insufficient blockage to impair blood flow, and 7 percent had "another condition." In a 1972 paper,2 a researcher named Roberts showed that in acute MIs, only 50-60 percent had evidence of sufficient blockage to impair blood flow. And a 25-year autopsy study of patients who died from an acute MI, carried out by Spain and Bradess, found that only 25 percent had sufficient blockage to account for their MI, while a total of 75 percent had only mild to moderate blockage.3 In a second paper,4 these same authors reported on a surprising discovery: when a heart attack is fatal, the longer the time elapsed between the MI and death (and then subsequent autopsy), the more likely they were to find significant blockages. If death occurred one hour after onset of an MI, only 16 percent had sufficient blockages to account for their MI; if death occurred 24 hours after the onset of an MI, the number with sufficient blockages to account for the heart attack increased to 53 percent. The authors concluded that the arterial blockages are a consequence, not a cause, of myocardial infarction.
As I looked into this subject further, I found that some of the most prominent cardiologists in our history were skeptical about the coronary artery theory of MI. For example, in 1972, Dr. George E. Burch stated, "The cardiac patient does not die from coronary disease, he dies from myocardial disease."5 A 1980 editorial in the prestigious journal Circulation states, "These data support the concept that an occlusive coronary thrombus (otherwise known as a blockage) has no primary role in the pathogenesis of a myocardial infarct."6 Finally, as recently as 1988, Dr. Epstein of the National Institutes of Health states: "They found that in an advanced state of narrowing of the coronary arteries, the supply of blood to the heart muscles is fully assured via collaterals that enlarge naturally in response to the blockage."7 In fact, researchers have found that the more the coronaries narrow, the less danger there is of a heart infarct.
These shocking studies dovetail perfectly with a different study, one that rocked the world of cardiology, published in 1988 titled "Twenty years of coronary bypass surgery."8 Referring to two major studies, the Veterans Administration (VA) study and the NIH Coronary Artery Surgery Study (CASS), the authors made the following statement: "Neither the VA nor the CASS has detected a significant difference in long-term survival between the medical and surgical treatment groups when all patients were included." In other words, surgery to bypass blocked arteries did not improve the chances of patient survival—not the result one would expect if blocked arteries were the cause of heart attacks. Thus, evidence for the coronary artery theory of MI is not strong; in fact, it is actually refuted in the relevant literature.
The Theory Fits The Facts
So, if heart attacks are not the result of coronary artery disease, then what does cause all these MIs? The myogenic theory of Dr. Mesquita, in fact, fits all the current observations about this condition. The myogenic theory postulates that as a result of disease in the small vessels—the capillaries and small arterioles—which is a consequence of such factors as stress, diabetes, smoking and nutritional deficiencies, heart cells, which are very active metabolically, suffer from inadequate oxygen and nutrient supply. This oxygen and nutrient deficiency increases under stressful conditions. When this happens, the heart cells revert to their backup system, which is anaerobic fermentation for energy generation— very similar to what happens in your leg muscles when you run too far or too hard. The anaerobic fermentation produces lactic acid which collects in the tissues. Because the heart, unlike your leg muscles, cannot rest, the acidosis progresses if untreated, leading to actual death of the myocardial cells.
As a result of this necrotic process, inflammatory debris collects in the tissues, and it is this debris that is the actual source of the coronary artery blockages seen in death from acute MI. As you would predict, the longer the time period between the MI and death, the greater the likelihood of blockage—exactly as observed in the studies. The only conclusion one can draw from this is that the heart cells die first and only then does the artery become blocked with debris liberated at myocardial cell death, which is precisely the kind of debris that is found in these blockages. The current practice of flushing out arterial blockages can help remove the debris and restore blood flow to the compromised arterial system, but this in no way suggests that blocked arteries represent the primary event in the sequence leading to an MI. However, the whole emphasis on the coronary artery blockage is fundamentally a dead end and doomed to failure, whether it is approached from a surgical (bypass, stents, etc.) or a medical (cholesterol-lowering drugs, restricted diets, etc.) point of view.
Myogenic Therapy
The myogenic theory points us to a very different kind of preventive treatment for heart disease, one that focuses on small vessel disease and the prevention of heart tissue acidosis. The theory also explains why stress, diabetes and smoking are such strong risk factors for MI, because these factors have all been shown to primarily affect small capillaries and small blood vessels, not the large coronary arteries. But the story gets even more interesting.
It turns out that there are simple, inexpensive and very effective compounds that effectively prevent lactic acidosis in the heart tissues. These medicines have been known for centuries as cardiotonics and have been used for treating heart disease in every traditional medical system in the world. The two best known are digitalis (the common foxglove) and strophanthus, an African vine. These plants are the source of so-called cardiac glycosides: digoxin and digitoxin from digitalis, and ouabain from strophanthus. The function of these compounds is to regulate the rhythm and power of the cardiac contraction and to prevent or reverse lactic acid buildup in the cardiac tissue. This is why these plants have been used for centuries to treat congestive heart failure, rhythm disturbances and other disorders of heart function.
The amazing thing is that these compounds are exact chemical copies of hormones made by our adrenal glands. And our adrenal glands produce these cardiotonics out of . . . cholesterol! Now we know why all the draconian dietary and pharmaceutical measures to lower cholesterol have not resulted in a decrease in the rates of MI, and why numerous studies have shown that as we age, those with the highest levels of cholesterol live the longest. When we lower cholesterol, we are depriving our bodies of the very substance they need to manufacture cardiotonics.
The myogenic theory also explains why stress can lead to heart attacks. In conditions of stress, our adrenal glands must work very hard to create numerous hormones that regulate the blood sugar and help the body heal. If the adrenal glands are weak or overloaded, production of cardiotonics goes on the back burner.
While there are few studies in the conventional literature that have considered the effectiveness of digitalis or strophanthus in the treatment of MI, Dr. Mesquita's clinical results over twenty-nine years show a dramatic lowering of the death rate, recurrent MI rate, angina rate and all symptoms in the spectrum of acute coronary syndrome with the use of oral low-dose digitalis glycosides. These results are published in Teoria Miogenica Do Enfarte Miocardico, available through the Infarct Combat project website, www.infarctcombat.org.
Also, a German cardiologist, Dr. Berthold Kern, used g-strophanthin in a study for the German government which showed a dramatic reduction in MIs in his practice, down from the expected 400 to 20, with the use of this medicine.9 Furthermore, many reports are coming in from Germany in which doctors have noted a decrease of up to 81 percent in angina attacks with the use of oral g-strophanthin.10
In my practice, I generally use oral strophanthin in the form of the preparation known as Strodival for all my angina and MI patients, and I have uniformly recorded a decrease in angina episodes, improved exercise tolerance and, thus far, no MIs. When combined with a nourishing traditional diet, cod liver oil, high vitamin butter oil, CoQ10 (which helps strengthen the heart muscle) and Standard Process heart nutrients (Cardioplus, two capsules three times per day, and Cataplex E2, two tablets three times per day), I have seen a huge improvement in the lives of patients with this otherwise devastating condition. (Note: Both digitialis leaf and Strodival are prescription-only items which need to be prescribed by a doctor who is well versed in their use.)
The final irony is that the traditional Chinese doctors were correct. The kidneys (their way of referring to the adrenal glands) help the body deal with stress as well as make hormones (digoxin and ouabain) that keep our marvelous hearts healthy, strong and open to enjoy the full richness of life
Sidebars
Why Plaque Is A Problem
While plaque in the arteries leading to blockage may not be the main cause of heart disease, there is no doubt that the phenomena of athersclerosis (plaque formation) is a real problem in people, especially as we age. Certain sections of our arteries are subject to thickening and the formation of what is called fatty streaks for reasons that have to do with flow dynamics, that is, the velocity of blood flow and turbulence in that particular artery. A certain amount of thickening in places where the blood creates a lot of pressure on the arteries is normal and protective, and it therefore occurs in everyone. But the build up of plaque is a different situation and can lead to many problems. For example, blocked arteries in the legs can cause calf cramps and pain, which we refer to as intermittent claudication (leg pain while walking). In the brain, plaque formation leads to ischemic (lack of blood flow) stroke. In the kidneys, diminished blood flow due to plaque formation is a possible contributing factor in some cases of hypertension (high blood pressure). Likewise, blocked arteries leading to the liver or spleen can result in reduced function of these organs. The reasons for this plaque formation are unclear. Although scientists have long blamed such build up on high cholesterol levels in the blood, informed medical researchers today often cite inflammation in the vessels as the cause. Of course, this inflammation is secondary to other factors, such as stress, consumption of processed vegetable oils and nutrient deficiencies (particularly of vitamins A and C and minerals like copper). But plaque formation is not a sufficient explanation for the whole phenomena of myocardial ischemia. The reason the heart but not the spleen or the liver has "attacks" is because the energy use of the heart is so much higher and also because the heart can never rest. Because scientists have overlooked these factors, treatment of heart disease today is far less effective than it otherwise could be. The only other organ that might be said to suffer from an "attack" is the brain when a stroke occurs. However, strokes usually happen when a clot forms in one of the arteries feeding the brain. The process is not the same as lactic acid build up in the heart.
How To Protect Your Capillaries
Avoid high blood sugar: diabetes is a serious risk factor for capillary damage. A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet is your best defense against diabetes. If you have diabetes, follow the protocol posted at www.westonaprice.org/moderndiseases/ diabetes.html.
Don't smoke! Smoking is a risk factor for capillary damage.
Engage in moderate outdoor exercise.
Avoid commercial liquid vegetable oils, which are full of free radicals that can damage capillaries.
Follow a nutrient-dense traditional diet
Be Kind To Your Adrenal Glands
Since the adrenal glands, specifically the adrenal cortex (the outer portion of the adrenal gland), produce protective cardiotonics, an important strategy in protecting yourself against heart attack is to strengthen the ability of this important gland to work properly.
Avoid stimulants such as caffeine and related substances in coffee, tea and chocolate. Caffeine causes the adrenal medulla (the inner part of the adrenal gland) to produce adrenaline. In response, the adrenal cortex must produce a host of corticoid hormones that bring the body back into homeostasis. Repeated jolts of caffeine can lead to adrenal burnout, a situation in which the adrenal cortex is unable to produce the myriad of protective and healing substance for the body, including the cardiotonics.
Don't try to lower your cholesterol—the cardiotonics are made from cholesterol.
Take cod liver oil for vitamin A. The body needs vitamin A to make all the adrenal cortex hormones from cholesterol. Vitamin A intake should be balanced with vitamin D (from cod liver oil) and vitamin K2 (from the fats and organ meats of grass-fed animals).
Don't consume trans fats. Trans fats (from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils) interfere with the enzyme system needed for the production of adrenal cortex hormones.
Take care to avoid low blood sugar. When blood sugar drops too low, the adrenal glands go into overdrive to produce hormones that bring the blood sugar back up. This means avoiding sugar and not skipping meals. There is just no substitute for three good meals a day, at regular intervals, which contain adequate protein and plentiful amounts of good fat.
References
American Journal of Cardiology, 1998; 82:839-44.
Circulation, 1972; 49:1.
American Journal of Medical Science, 1960 240:701.
Circulation,1960, 22: 816.
American Heart Journal. 1972 Mar;83(3):340-50.
Circulation 1980 Jul;62(1):17-19.
Epstein SE. American Journal of Cardiology 1988 Apr 1;61(10):866-8.
Killip T. New England Journal of Medicine 1988 Aug 11;319(6):366-8.
Unpublished communication.
Unpublished communication.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2007.
About the Author
Thomas Cowan, MD, discovered the work of the two men who would have the most influence on his career while teaching gardening as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, South Africa. He read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price and a fellow volunteer explained the arcane principles of Rudolf Steiner's biodynamic agriculture. These events inspired him to pursue a medical degree. Cowan graduated from Michigan State University College of Human Medicine in 1984. After his residency in Family Practice at Johnson City Hospital in Johnson City, New York, he set up an anthroposophical medical practice in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Dr. Cowan has served as vice president of the Physicians Association for Anthroposophical Medicine and is a founding board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation.
Dr. Cowan is the author of The Fourfold Path to Healing (New Trends Publishing), a companion book to Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. He a board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a regular contributor to our "Ask the Doctor" column and the Foundation's quarterly journal, and has lectured throughout the US and Canada. He has three grown children and currently practices medicine in San Francisco where he resides with his wife Lynda Smith Cowan.
His book The Fourfold Path to Healing is now available from NewTrends Publishing, http://www.newtrendspublishing.com/. Visit Dr. Cowan's website at http://www.fourfoldhealing.com.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Smoothies for Summer...yumm!
Frozen Banana Latte
1 cup yogurt ( I used Greek God, vanilla; you could use plain and add a little honey)
1 cup raw milk
2 to 3 tsp. instant coffee granules
2 ripe bananas, sliced and frozen
Place ingredients in blender; process until smooth and frothy. Sprinkle with cinnamon, if desired, and serve immediately.
(serving size: about 1 cup)
Even a frothy latte-inspired cooler offers a genuine nutritional kick; with a day's worth of potassium and magnesium, plus a good amount of calcium. And the little bit of caffeine will give you a nice perk! Enjoy!
1 cup yogurt ( I used Greek God, vanilla; you could use plain and add a little honey)
1 cup raw milk
2 to 3 tsp. instant coffee granules
2 ripe bananas, sliced and frozen
Place ingredients in blender; process until smooth and frothy. Sprinkle with cinnamon, if desired, and serve immediately.
(serving size: about 1 cup)
Even a frothy latte-inspired cooler offers a genuine nutritional kick; with a day's worth of potassium and magnesium, plus a good amount of calcium. And the little bit of caffeine will give you a nice perk! Enjoy!
Thursday, June 30, 2011
You can afford to eat better!
Whole food -- that is to say, unprocessed and unrefined food -- has the reputation of being expensive. But there are many ways to add whole food to your diet while sticking to your budget. Seattle PI suggests a few:
1.Buy seasonal: Fruits and vegetables are both cheaper and tastier when purchased in season.
2.Use the bulk bins: You won't pay for packaging, labeling and advertising.
3.Grow your own: A sunny yard or even a window box can add cheap, fresh food to your plate.
4.Use your freezer: Stock up and freeze when whole food is on sale.
5.Reduce waste: Don't let leftovers go to waste.
Sources:
Seattle PI June 14, 2011
Disclaimer: while I don't always agree with Dr. Mercola, in this case I do.
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
Purchasing healthy whole foods to feed your family is one of the best investments you can make. The nutrients wholesome food provides will allow your family members to maintain their good health, and even in some cases heal from disease, and this is a gift that is truly priceless.
So while you may be able to get a hamburger for $1 at a fast-food drive through – and this may seem like a budget-savvy option – that money is being essentially wasted because the food is doing absolutely nothing beneficial for your health. You're better off spending that dollar on a pound of string beans or zucchini, or putting it toward a pound of grass-fed meat, than you are throwing it away on processed junk food.
Still, readers have regularly posted that one of the leading obstacles to achieving health is having too limited a budget to maintain a healthy lifestyle ... so I want to share some practical tips you can use to help you save money on groceries and still get healthy food.
First, Trim Your Food Waste
Seattle PI has listed five starter tips above, which are well worth noting, but I want to expand on #5: reducing food waste. Any food you purchase and throw away is, quite literally, akin to throwing your money in the trash. This is actually a major problem, as one-third of the food produced in the world is lost or wasted, according to a new report commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. This massive number equates to 1.3 billion tons of food annually.
In 2008, the New York Times featured a graphic that shows one U.S. family's share of food waste for one month, which is really eye opening. Using statistics from a 1995 federal study that found over 96 billion edible pounds of food were wasted by U.S. retailers, food service businesses and consumers that year, they figured that a family of four throws out about 122 pounds of food each month.
This adds up to hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year wasted, which is why it's so important to be sure your family is eating all of the food you purchase.
The solution to waste is NOT to load up on more processed or canned foods simply because you can store them until the end of time. Their extreme shelf life comes at a high price, as they are often loaded with chemical preservatives. Remember, the fresher your foods are to start with, the longer they'll be safe to eat, so choose small amounts of the freshest foods you can find and eat them as soon as possible.
Recently I detailed more tips to prevent food waste in your home. For instance, if you have a refrigerator drawer full of veggies that are starting to wilt, making vegetable juice is an easy, and incredibly nutritious, way to use them up.
Should You Bother Buying Organic?
Once you've nixed food waste, the next step is to learn how to stretch your food budget to the max without sacrificing quality. One of the simplest ways to do this is to prioritize your spending on higher priced foods, such as organics (these tend to be pricier than conventionally grown foods, but this is not always the case). If you're on a tight budget but want to improve your diet by shopping organic, animal products like meat, raw dairy, poultry and eggs is the place to start.
Since animal products tend to bioaccumulate toxins from their pesticide-laced feed, concentrating them to far higher concentrations than are typically present in vegetables, I strongly recommend you buy only organically raised animal foods.
When it comes to produce, if you can't find the best of both worlds, which is locally grown organics, then buying fresh, vibrant locally grown conventional produce may actually be better than wilted organics. However, it can be tricky, since some conventionally grown produce simply LOOKS fresher due to all the chemicals they've been treated with. Perhaps your best bet, if you can't find locally grown organics, is to opt for USDA certified organic, but not imported organic, over the conventionally grown variety.
For more specifics, here are 10 organic foods that are worth the money.
How to Eat Healthy on a Budget
When planning out a healthy, price-conscious grocery list, be sure you are not throwing money away on processed foods. These tend to be among the most costly items in the grocery store, and they are virtually always close to worthless for your health, as they consist mainly of fillers and additives, and very few actual nutrients.
A classic example of this is breakfast cereal, most of which are very expensive yet frightfully high in sugar, and any nutrients they boast are in the form of suboptimal synthetic additives, or worse.
For example, iron-fortified cereals can contain actual iron filings, which is a far cry from the bioavailable iron you get from iron-rich vegetables like spinach. If you haven't seen this eye-opening demonstration of what's really in that fortified breakfast cereal, take a look now—you'll probably never buy another box of cereal again, and rightfully so.
So ditch the old processed standbys and instead set your grocery radar on finding the foods that will give you the most "health bang for your buck." With a little creative use of your dollar, you can enjoy nutrient-packed food choices that are around $1 per serving, such as:
•Cage-free organic eggs
•Raw organic milk
•Raw nuts and seeds
•Coconut milk
•Spinach
15 Cost-Saving Grocery Tips
When it comes to the price of food, it's extremely important to remember that a food cannot be judged by its sticker price alone. Believe me, a diet consisting of daily $1.99 hamburgers and other fast foods, while appearing to be frugal, is far from it when you consider what these foods are doing—or not doing—to your health.
With that in mind, here are 15 tips that are the best of the best to get high-quality food on a limited budget:
1.Choose local foods over organic foods. Often, locally grown foods are raised according to organic standards at a more affordable price.
2.If all that's available or affordable is fresh, conventionally grown produce, buy it, wash it well at home, and eat it.
3.Look for local farms, farmer's markets and food coops offering raw dairy products, eggs, produce, and grass-fed meat. This will allow you to cut out the middleman and save money. Buying in large quantities, such as a side of grass-fed beef, can also save you money in the long run as long as you have room to freeze it (and you consume it before it goes bad).
4.Skip ready-made meals and prepared or pre-cut foods, which can cost up to double the amount as the unprepared versions.
5.Plan your meals ahead of time (including cooking large batches and freezing some for later) so you don't splurge on expensive, unhealthy fast-food at the last minute.
6.Pass on processed junk foods like potato chips, soda, cookies, candy, and other snacks. These are a complete waste of money, even if they're "organic."
7.Buy plenty of fresh veggies, they're usually less expensive than canned versions (just make sure you use them before they go bad).
8.Only buy what you need. Keep track of what's in your pantry so you don't double-up on foods unnecessarily.
9.Clip coupons and use them when you can (but don't buy something unhealthy just because it's on sale).
10.Watch the register when you check out of the grocery store. They often ring up wrong prices, at your expense.
11.Shop with a calculator so you can determine if it's really a better deal to buy something in bulk or in a larger size.
12.Watch weekly specials, and be aware of what's really a good price. You can often find organic produce on sale for less than conventional produce if you know what prices to watch for.
13.If you have the space, consider starting your own vegetable garden. When factoring in startup and maintenance costs, a well-maintained food garden yields a $500 average return each year compared to the market price of produce, according to the National Gardening Association (NGA). So there is a definite financial incentive there.
14.Remember this rule of thumb: Fresh food is always better than frozen, but frozen is better than canned.
15.Make the most of your food purchases by focusing on those that are right for your nutritional type. The nutritional typing assessment is now absolutely free, and will give you an idea of which foods you should eat for optimal health and nutrition.
1.Buy seasonal: Fruits and vegetables are both cheaper and tastier when purchased in season.
2.Use the bulk bins: You won't pay for packaging, labeling and advertising.
3.Grow your own: A sunny yard or even a window box can add cheap, fresh food to your plate.
4.Use your freezer: Stock up and freeze when whole food is on sale.
5.Reduce waste: Don't let leftovers go to waste.
Sources:
Seattle PI June 14, 2011
Disclaimer: while I don't always agree with Dr. Mercola, in this case I do.
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
Purchasing healthy whole foods to feed your family is one of the best investments you can make. The nutrients wholesome food provides will allow your family members to maintain their good health, and even in some cases heal from disease, and this is a gift that is truly priceless.
So while you may be able to get a hamburger for $1 at a fast-food drive through – and this may seem like a budget-savvy option – that money is being essentially wasted because the food is doing absolutely nothing beneficial for your health. You're better off spending that dollar on a pound of string beans or zucchini, or putting it toward a pound of grass-fed meat, than you are throwing it away on processed junk food.
Still, readers have regularly posted that one of the leading obstacles to achieving health is having too limited a budget to maintain a healthy lifestyle ... so I want to share some practical tips you can use to help you save money on groceries and still get healthy food.
First, Trim Your Food Waste
Seattle PI has listed five starter tips above, which are well worth noting, but I want to expand on #5: reducing food waste. Any food you purchase and throw away is, quite literally, akin to throwing your money in the trash. This is actually a major problem, as one-third of the food produced in the world is lost or wasted, according to a new report commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. This massive number equates to 1.3 billion tons of food annually.
In 2008, the New York Times featured a graphic that shows one U.S. family's share of food waste for one month, which is really eye opening. Using statistics from a 1995 federal study that found over 96 billion edible pounds of food were wasted by U.S. retailers, food service businesses and consumers that year, they figured that a family of four throws out about 122 pounds of food each month.
This adds up to hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year wasted, which is why it's so important to be sure your family is eating all of the food you purchase.
The solution to waste is NOT to load up on more processed or canned foods simply because you can store them until the end of time. Their extreme shelf life comes at a high price, as they are often loaded with chemical preservatives. Remember, the fresher your foods are to start with, the longer they'll be safe to eat, so choose small amounts of the freshest foods you can find and eat them as soon as possible.
Recently I detailed more tips to prevent food waste in your home. For instance, if you have a refrigerator drawer full of veggies that are starting to wilt, making vegetable juice is an easy, and incredibly nutritious, way to use them up.
Should You Bother Buying Organic?
Once you've nixed food waste, the next step is to learn how to stretch your food budget to the max without sacrificing quality. One of the simplest ways to do this is to prioritize your spending on higher priced foods, such as organics (these tend to be pricier than conventionally grown foods, but this is not always the case). If you're on a tight budget but want to improve your diet by shopping organic, animal products like meat, raw dairy, poultry and eggs is the place to start.
Since animal products tend to bioaccumulate toxins from their pesticide-laced feed, concentrating them to far higher concentrations than are typically present in vegetables, I strongly recommend you buy only organically raised animal foods.
When it comes to produce, if you can't find the best of both worlds, which is locally grown organics, then buying fresh, vibrant locally grown conventional produce may actually be better than wilted organics. However, it can be tricky, since some conventionally grown produce simply LOOKS fresher due to all the chemicals they've been treated with. Perhaps your best bet, if you can't find locally grown organics, is to opt for USDA certified organic, but not imported organic, over the conventionally grown variety.
For more specifics, here are 10 organic foods that are worth the money.
How to Eat Healthy on a Budget
When planning out a healthy, price-conscious grocery list, be sure you are not throwing money away on processed foods. These tend to be among the most costly items in the grocery store, and they are virtually always close to worthless for your health, as they consist mainly of fillers and additives, and very few actual nutrients.
A classic example of this is breakfast cereal, most of which are very expensive yet frightfully high in sugar, and any nutrients they boast are in the form of suboptimal synthetic additives, or worse.
For example, iron-fortified cereals can contain actual iron filings, which is a far cry from the bioavailable iron you get from iron-rich vegetables like spinach. If you haven't seen this eye-opening demonstration of what's really in that fortified breakfast cereal, take a look now—you'll probably never buy another box of cereal again, and rightfully so.
So ditch the old processed standbys and instead set your grocery radar on finding the foods that will give you the most "health bang for your buck." With a little creative use of your dollar, you can enjoy nutrient-packed food choices that are around $1 per serving, such as:
•Cage-free organic eggs
•Raw organic milk
•Raw nuts and seeds
•Coconut milk
•Spinach
15 Cost-Saving Grocery Tips
When it comes to the price of food, it's extremely important to remember that a food cannot be judged by its sticker price alone. Believe me, a diet consisting of daily $1.99 hamburgers and other fast foods, while appearing to be frugal, is far from it when you consider what these foods are doing—or not doing—to your health.
With that in mind, here are 15 tips that are the best of the best to get high-quality food on a limited budget:
1.Choose local foods over organic foods. Often, locally grown foods are raised according to organic standards at a more affordable price.
2.If all that's available or affordable is fresh, conventionally grown produce, buy it, wash it well at home, and eat it.
3.Look for local farms, farmer's markets and food coops offering raw dairy products, eggs, produce, and grass-fed meat. This will allow you to cut out the middleman and save money. Buying in large quantities, such as a side of grass-fed beef, can also save you money in the long run as long as you have room to freeze it (and you consume it before it goes bad).
4.Skip ready-made meals and prepared or pre-cut foods, which can cost up to double the amount as the unprepared versions.
5.Plan your meals ahead of time (including cooking large batches and freezing some for later) so you don't splurge on expensive, unhealthy fast-food at the last minute.
6.Pass on processed junk foods like potato chips, soda, cookies, candy, and other snacks. These are a complete waste of money, even if they're "organic."
7.Buy plenty of fresh veggies, they're usually less expensive than canned versions (just make sure you use them before they go bad).
8.Only buy what you need. Keep track of what's in your pantry so you don't double-up on foods unnecessarily.
9.Clip coupons and use them when you can (but don't buy something unhealthy just because it's on sale).
10.Watch the register when you check out of the grocery store. They often ring up wrong prices, at your expense.
11.Shop with a calculator so you can determine if it's really a better deal to buy something in bulk or in a larger size.
12.Watch weekly specials, and be aware of what's really a good price. You can often find organic produce on sale for less than conventional produce if you know what prices to watch for.
13.If you have the space, consider starting your own vegetable garden. When factoring in startup and maintenance costs, a well-maintained food garden yields a $500 average return each year compared to the market price of produce, according to the National Gardening Association (NGA). So there is a definite financial incentive there.
14.Remember this rule of thumb: Fresh food is always better than frozen, but frozen is better than canned.
15.Make the most of your food purchases by focusing on those that are right for your nutritional type. The nutritional typing assessment is now absolutely free, and will give you an idea of which foods you should eat for optimal health and nutrition.
Monday, June 27, 2011
SPF 100...seriously!!
Natural sunlight's potential to harm you has really been blown out of proportion. This is thanks to many doctors, health officials, advertisements, beauty experts, corporations, and well-meaning friends. They basically tell you that you need to stay out of the sun because the sun will kill you. This simply isn't true.
For starters, there is little scientific evidence to justify the many health campaigns that urge you to completely avoid the sun. Avoiding the sun just doesn't make sense. And it certainly doesn't make any sense when study after study shows that ...
The Sun is Not Deadly In fact, the sun is healthy for you. Think about it. How could it be any other way?
After all, your ancestors survived outdoors, working outside under the sun's rays far more often than they were indoors and out of the sun.
This brings up an obvious question.
How on earth would it be possible for your body to end up being configured in such a way that the sun is now a deadly threat to you, me, and the entire human race?
Like I said, it simply isn't true.
That's not to say sunlight can't be harmful. Of course, it can be...
For instance, long-term, excessive exposure to sunlight can increase the risk of certain types of skin cancer. Yet moderate sun exposure is less dangerous than sporadic sun exposure.
Plus, there's a good deal of evidence that sun exposure without sunburn significantly decreases the risk of melanoma (a more deadly form of skin cancer.) So safe sun exposure is key.
What You Should Know About UVA and UVB Rays
Ultraviolet light from the sun comes in two main wavelengths -- UVA and UVB. It's important for you to understand the difference between them, and your risk factors from each.
Consider UVB the 'good guy' -- though of course you can't de-select UVA if you're going to be in the sun. UVB helps your skin produce vitamin D.
UVA is considered the 'bad guy' because it penetrates your skin more deeply and causes more free radical damage. Not only that, but UVA rays are quite constant during all the hours of daylight throughout the entire year.
By comparison, UVB waves are low in morning and evening and high at midday.
So, if you're out early in the morning or late in the day, you get lots of UVA (bad guy) and not much UVB (good guy). Not a good way to produce vitamin D. Plus you increase your risk of cancer if that's your only sun intake, and you fail to protect your skin.
What's more, have you ever gotten a scorching sunburn on a cloudy day? You think you don't need to protect yourself and you wind up being really sorry you didn't. That's the UVA rays at work. They can break through cloud cover and pollution and do some real damage your skin.
Kind of a Catch 22.
As you may know, wearing a sunscreen on your uncovered skin blocks your body's production of vitamin D. In fact, sunscreens reduce vitamin D production by as much as 97.5 to 99.9%. And interfering with your body's production of vitamin D by 97.5 to 99.9% may have dire health consequences.
After all, vitamin D plays a crucial role in your overall health and well-being. For example, this superb vitamin is known to:
Support your cardiovascular health
Promote optimal cholesterol levels
Enhance your muscle strength
Help produce optimal blood pressure levels
Help maintain a healthy immune system
Support healthy kidney function
Promote healthy teeth
Help keep your bones strong and healthy
Please understand -- this list of important benefits represents a tiny fraction of the ways vitamin D keeps you healthy and fit. And, although you can get vitamin D from natural food sources, experts agree on one thing.
Natural Sunlight is Far and Away the Best Way to Get Your Vitamin D!Sun: Good for you, so long as you don't burn. Protect your skin from overexposure with Natural Sunscreen today.
And it is the ultimate way. Why? Because as soon as the sun's ultraviolet rays strike your skin, your body is programmed to do something remarkable. It starts producing its own natural vitamin D.
Better yet, your body produces the most active form of vitamin D in existence -- calciferol. Also known as vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is actually the precise form your body needs for the proper functioning of your organs and cells.
And luckily for all of us, our bodies automatically generate enough of it with virtually no risk of overdose. They just know when to stop producing natural vitamin D before it can reach toxic levels.
However, elevated vitamin D levels obtained strictly from oral supplements can take six months or longer to normalize. That's why I don't recommend supplementing your vitamin D with pills. If you do take vitamin D supplements, you need to get your blood levels tested regularly to avoid toxicity.
With natural sunlight, you may be wondering what precautions you need to take...
Should You Use a Sunscreen to Guard Against SUNBURN?
Absolutely! But not any kind of commercial sunscreen. More on that in a moment -- but first, let me just say...
As much as I prefer you steer clear of sunscreens because they interfere with natural vitamin D production, there is one critical exception.
The exception is when it is impossible to limit full body exposure to sunlight! So if you can't limit your exposure for whatever reason, do use a safe sunscreen to protect your skin from sunburn. It is for YOUR own good.
Your risk of getting melanoma may increase in relationship to sunburn frequency and severity. Limiting sun exposure, wearing protective clothing, and using a 100% all-natural, non chemical sunscreen can reduce the risks of skin cancer and other harmful effects of the sun.
Studies revealed that people who spend more time outdoors without getting sunburn, actually decrease their risk of developing melanoma.
Now get this:
Safe sunlight exposure has also been shown to protect against as many as sixteen different types of cancer, including breast, colon, endometrial, esophageal, ovarian, bladder, gallbladder, gastric, pancreatic, prostate, rectal, and renal cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
So, yes, your body needs a bit of unprotected sun exposure. For all the benefits I've mentioned earlier. But if you can't avoid the following three scenarios:
You're forced to be in the direct rays of the sun for a longer time than is safe...
You must go into intense sunlight without having the opportunity to gradually build up to it...
You're in a situation where blocking the sun with strategic clothing or sunshades is impractical...
...use a sunscreen to help guard against sunburn. But, don't just slap on any of the standard commercial brands you find on store shelves. With that in mind...
It's Time to Expose the Sunscreen Smokescreen!
In my opinion, corporate greed has created products that are harmful.
I'm talking hundreds of sunscreens that I believe are toxic because they contain man-made chemicals ... chemicals I believe can cause serious health problems and increase your risk of disease. Here's why.
The main chemical used in sunscreens to filter out ultraviolet B light is octyl methoxycinnamate. OMC for short. OMC was found to kill mouse cells even at low doses. Plus, it was also shown to be particularly toxic when exposed to sunshine. And guess what?
OMC is present in 90 percent of sunscreen brands!
But that's not the half of it. A common ultraviolet A filter, butyl methoxydibenzoylmethane, has also demonstrated toxic properties.
Furthermore, several studies show that the chemicals commonly used in sunscreens are absorbed through the skin and end up circulating in your blood stream. Not good. So...
If Your Sunscreen Contains Any of These Chemicals That I Consider Dangerous and Potentially Life Threatening, Do Yourself a BIG Favor...
Dump it in the trash now .
Yes, that's right. Toss your sunscreen in the trash if it contains any of these questionable chemicals:
Toss your sunscreen in the trash if it contains any of these chemicals I consider to be potentially harmful.
Para amino benzoic acid...
Octyl salicyclate...
Avobenzone...
Oxybenzone...
Cinoxate...
Padimate O...
Dioxybenzone...
Phenylbenzimidazole...
Homosalate...
Sulisobenzone...
Menthyl anthranilate...
Trolamine salicyclate...
Octocrylene...
And, oh yes, let me not forget...
Potentially harmful chemicals such as dioxybenzone and oxybenzone (two chemicals I just mentioned) are some of the most powerful free radical generators known to man!
So if your sunscreen contains dioxybenzone, oxybenzone, or any of the other chemicals I just revealed, I highly recommend you switch to a formula that is safe and healthy for your skin.
And a note to moms ... You are undoubtedly very conscientious about caring for your children. But when you lather up your son or daughter with sunscreen thinking you're doing the right thing, you could in fact be doing more harm than good.
So check the labels on your sunscreen, and throw them out if they contain any of the potentially dangerous chemicals named above. After all, your skin is your largest organ, as your child's skin is theirs.
And it may surprise you to find out that zinc oxide has been used all over the world for over 75 years as a safe sunscreen to help you prevent excessive sun exposure.
Unlike chemical sunscreens that absorb ultraviolet light, nature provides us with titanium dioxide and zinc oxide ... two remarkable ingredients that remain on your skin to reflect and scatter away both UVA and UVB rays from your body. How do they do this?
Quite simply, they do it by forming a physical barrier, without irritating or clogging your pores.
~Dr. Mercola
So...what kind of sunscreen do I use on my family? Simple: A & D Zinc Oxide Cream
But don't look for it in the sunscreen isle; you'll find it in the diaper area....and it's a lot cheaper than your commercial brand suncreens.
For starters, there is little scientific evidence to justify the many health campaigns that urge you to completely avoid the sun. Avoiding the sun just doesn't make sense. And it certainly doesn't make any sense when study after study shows that ...
The Sun is Not Deadly In fact, the sun is healthy for you. Think about it. How could it be any other way?
After all, your ancestors survived outdoors, working outside under the sun's rays far more often than they were indoors and out of the sun.
This brings up an obvious question.
How on earth would it be possible for your body to end up being configured in such a way that the sun is now a deadly threat to you, me, and the entire human race?
Like I said, it simply isn't true.
That's not to say sunlight can't be harmful. Of course, it can be...
For instance, long-term, excessive exposure to sunlight can increase the risk of certain types of skin cancer. Yet moderate sun exposure is less dangerous than sporadic sun exposure.
Plus, there's a good deal of evidence that sun exposure without sunburn significantly decreases the risk of melanoma (a more deadly form of skin cancer.) So safe sun exposure is key.
What You Should Know About UVA and UVB Rays
Ultraviolet light from the sun comes in two main wavelengths -- UVA and UVB. It's important for you to understand the difference between them, and your risk factors from each.
Consider UVB the 'good guy' -- though of course you can't de-select UVA if you're going to be in the sun. UVB helps your skin produce vitamin D.
UVA is considered the 'bad guy' because it penetrates your skin more deeply and causes more free radical damage. Not only that, but UVA rays are quite constant during all the hours of daylight throughout the entire year.
By comparison, UVB waves are low in morning and evening and high at midday.
So, if you're out early in the morning or late in the day, you get lots of UVA (bad guy) and not much UVB (good guy). Not a good way to produce vitamin D. Plus you increase your risk of cancer if that's your only sun intake, and you fail to protect your skin.
What's more, have you ever gotten a scorching sunburn on a cloudy day? You think you don't need to protect yourself and you wind up being really sorry you didn't. That's the UVA rays at work. They can break through cloud cover and pollution and do some real damage your skin.
Kind of a Catch 22.
As you may know, wearing a sunscreen on your uncovered skin blocks your body's production of vitamin D. In fact, sunscreens reduce vitamin D production by as much as 97.5 to 99.9%. And interfering with your body's production of vitamin D by 97.5 to 99.9% may have dire health consequences.
After all, vitamin D plays a crucial role in your overall health and well-being. For example, this superb vitamin is known to:
Support your cardiovascular health
Promote optimal cholesterol levels
Enhance your muscle strength
Help produce optimal blood pressure levels
Help maintain a healthy immune system
Support healthy kidney function
Promote healthy teeth
Help keep your bones strong and healthy
Please understand -- this list of important benefits represents a tiny fraction of the ways vitamin D keeps you healthy and fit. And, although you can get vitamin D from natural food sources, experts agree on one thing.
Natural Sunlight is Far and Away the Best Way to Get Your Vitamin D!Sun: Good for you, so long as you don't burn. Protect your skin from overexposure with Natural Sunscreen today.
And it is the ultimate way. Why? Because as soon as the sun's ultraviolet rays strike your skin, your body is programmed to do something remarkable. It starts producing its own natural vitamin D.
Better yet, your body produces the most active form of vitamin D in existence -- calciferol. Also known as vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is actually the precise form your body needs for the proper functioning of your organs and cells.
And luckily for all of us, our bodies automatically generate enough of it with virtually no risk of overdose. They just know when to stop producing natural vitamin D before it can reach toxic levels.
However, elevated vitamin D levels obtained strictly from oral supplements can take six months or longer to normalize. That's why I don't recommend supplementing your vitamin D with pills. If you do take vitamin D supplements, you need to get your blood levels tested regularly to avoid toxicity.
With natural sunlight, you may be wondering what precautions you need to take...
Should You Use a Sunscreen to Guard Against SUNBURN?
Absolutely! But not any kind of commercial sunscreen. More on that in a moment -- but first, let me just say...
As much as I prefer you steer clear of sunscreens because they interfere with natural vitamin D production, there is one critical exception.
The exception is when it is impossible to limit full body exposure to sunlight! So if you can't limit your exposure for whatever reason, do use a safe sunscreen to protect your skin from sunburn. It is for YOUR own good.
Your risk of getting melanoma may increase in relationship to sunburn frequency and severity. Limiting sun exposure, wearing protective clothing, and using a 100% all-natural, non chemical sunscreen can reduce the risks of skin cancer and other harmful effects of the sun.
Studies revealed that people who spend more time outdoors without getting sunburn, actually decrease their risk of developing melanoma.
Now get this:
Safe sunlight exposure has also been shown to protect against as many as sixteen different types of cancer, including breast, colon, endometrial, esophageal, ovarian, bladder, gallbladder, gastric, pancreatic, prostate, rectal, and renal cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
So, yes, your body needs a bit of unprotected sun exposure. For all the benefits I've mentioned earlier. But if you can't avoid the following three scenarios:
You're forced to be in the direct rays of the sun for a longer time than is safe...
You must go into intense sunlight without having the opportunity to gradually build up to it...
You're in a situation where blocking the sun with strategic clothing or sunshades is impractical...
...use a sunscreen to help guard against sunburn. But, don't just slap on any of the standard commercial brands you find on store shelves. With that in mind...
It's Time to Expose the Sunscreen Smokescreen!
In my opinion, corporate greed has created products that are harmful.
I'm talking hundreds of sunscreens that I believe are toxic because they contain man-made chemicals ... chemicals I believe can cause serious health problems and increase your risk of disease. Here's why.
The main chemical used in sunscreens to filter out ultraviolet B light is octyl methoxycinnamate. OMC for short. OMC was found to kill mouse cells even at low doses. Plus, it was also shown to be particularly toxic when exposed to sunshine. And guess what?
OMC is present in 90 percent of sunscreen brands!
But that's not the half of it. A common ultraviolet A filter, butyl methoxydibenzoylmethane, has also demonstrated toxic properties.
Furthermore, several studies show that the chemicals commonly used in sunscreens are absorbed through the skin and end up circulating in your blood stream. Not good. So...
If Your Sunscreen Contains Any of These Chemicals That I Consider Dangerous and Potentially Life Threatening, Do Yourself a BIG Favor...
Dump it in the trash now .
Yes, that's right. Toss your sunscreen in the trash if it contains any of these questionable chemicals:
Toss your sunscreen in the trash if it contains any of these chemicals I consider to be potentially harmful.
Para amino benzoic acid...
Octyl salicyclate...
Avobenzone...
Oxybenzone...
Cinoxate...
Padimate O...
Dioxybenzone...
Phenylbenzimidazole...
Homosalate...
Sulisobenzone...
Menthyl anthranilate...
Trolamine salicyclate...
Octocrylene...
And, oh yes, let me not forget...
Potentially harmful chemicals such as dioxybenzone and oxybenzone (two chemicals I just mentioned) are some of the most powerful free radical generators known to man!
So if your sunscreen contains dioxybenzone, oxybenzone, or any of the other chemicals I just revealed, I highly recommend you switch to a formula that is safe and healthy for your skin.
And a note to moms ... You are undoubtedly very conscientious about caring for your children. But when you lather up your son or daughter with sunscreen thinking you're doing the right thing, you could in fact be doing more harm than good.
So check the labels on your sunscreen, and throw them out if they contain any of the potentially dangerous chemicals named above. After all, your skin is your largest organ, as your child's skin is theirs.
And it may surprise you to find out that zinc oxide has been used all over the world for over 75 years as a safe sunscreen to help you prevent excessive sun exposure.
Unlike chemical sunscreens that absorb ultraviolet light, nature provides us with titanium dioxide and zinc oxide ... two remarkable ingredients that remain on your skin to reflect and scatter away both UVA and UVB rays from your body. How do they do this?
Quite simply, they do it by forming a physical barrier, without irritating or clogging your pores.
~Dr. Mercola
So...what kind of sunscreen do I use on my family? Simple: A & D Zinc Oxide Cream
But don't look for it in the sunscreen isle; you'll find it in the diaper area....and it's a lot cheaper than your commercial brand suncreens.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Grass-Fed is Great!
A study published by the British Journal of Nutrition (Vol. 105, issue 01) earlier this year again confirms that red meat from animals that eat grass is better and not only that, it's actually good for your heart. Omega-3 fatty acids are beneficial in our diets because they help stabalize atherosclerotic plaques, which reduces the liklihood that the plaque will rupture, causing a number of heart and artery issues. These specific fatty acids also reduce arterial inflammation and clotting. So, EATING GRASS-FED RED MEAT IS ACTUALLY GOOD FOR YOUR HEART!
* Grass-fed meat has a significantly better fat and antioxidant profile than grain-finished meat. And before critics claim victory regarding saturated fats, allow me to say that the levels of saturated fats in grain vs. grass fed are similar, but the specific saturated fats that are associated with harmful cholesterol levels are higher in industrial meat. (What you normally see at your grocery store)
* Grass-fed meat contains higher levels of conjugated linoleic acids (CLA), which have been linked to reduced cancer rates, reduced arterial disease and reduced diabetes levels.
* Grass-fed meats' omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio is closer to the dietary ideal, making it better for your brain than industrial meat.
* Grass-fed meat contains more Vitamin A and Vitamin E precursors.
Grass-fed red meats are leaner and contain proportionally more of many important nutrients. And, it just tastes better! You can order a steak from your favorite restaurant and it might look and feel juicy and tender, but your first bites leaves you with a dissapointing lack of flavor...which is why you always have to cover it in some kind of sauce. My Dad always said he could make a better steak at home...and indeed, he could. Our family has been eating grass-fed meat for a long time and we love it. You'll be amazed at how much more easily it's digested, meaning you feel strong and satisfied after your steak, rather than full and bloated. I love to marinate my steaks in any oil/acid combination like olive oil and balsamic vinegar or olive oil and Worchestershire, season it nicely with salt, pepper, garlic, and onion or even a Chinese 5-spice mixture (thanks to my friend Jillia) and some soy sauce. Whatever flavors you're in the mood for! You'll find a great source for grass-fed meat in my list to the right: click on www.eatwild.com. Or, if you have a couple acres and are a little ambitious like us, you can buy your own beef cow! Either way, you're doing something better for your health.
* Grass-fed meat has a significantly better fat and antioxidant profile than grain-finished meat. And before critics claim victory regarding saturated fats, allow me to say that the levels of saturated fats in grain vs. grass fed are similar, but the specific saturated fats that are associated with harmful cholesterol levels are higher in industrial meat. (What you normally see at your grocery store)
* Grass-fed meat contains higher levels of conjugated linoleic acids (CLA), which have been linked to reduced cancer rates, reduced arterial disease and reduced diabetes levels.
* Grass-fed meats' omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio is closer to the dietary ideal, making it better for your brain than industrial meat.
* Grass-fed meat contains more Vitamin A and Vitamin E precursors.
Grass-fed red meats are leaner and contain proportionally more of many important nutrients. And, it just tastes better! You can order a steak from your favorite restaurant and it might look and feel juicy and tender, but your first bites leaves you with a dissapointing lack of flavor...which is why you always have to cover it in some kind of sauce. My Dad always said he could make a better steak at home...and indeed, he could. Our family has been eating grass-fed meat for a long time and we love it. You'll be amazed at how much more easily it's digested, meaning you feel strong and satisfied after your steak, rather than full and bloated. I love to marinate my steaks in any oil/acid combination like olive oil and balsamic vinegar or olive oil and Worchestershire, season it nicely with salt, pepper, garlic, and onion or even a Chinese 5-spice mixture (thanks to my friend Jillia) and some soy sauce. Whatever flavors you're in the mood for! You'll find a great source for grass-fed meat in my list to the right: click on www.eatwild.com. Or, if you have a couple acres and are a little ambitious like us, you can buy your own beef cow! Either way, you're doing something better for your health.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Healthy Women, Healthy Nation (menopause)
Menopause
Natalie Angier, author of Women: An Intimate Biography, points out that the condition of menopause is unique to humans.48 In all other species, the female is fecund throughout her life, able to give birth until the time of death; but human females enjoy a long period in later life in which they are freed from the role of child-bearer.
Actually, menopause occurs in human females for a very practical reason. Human mothers in foraging societies can care for one infant, but because human children develop slowly, they are not able to provide food for themselves and their children when a second child is born. Assistance comes from grandmothers and aunts who no longer bear children and are thus freed up to aid in the nourishment of the younger generation.
Humans differ from other animals in the complexity of their nervous systems, complexity that requires many years to develop. If human females did not experience the cessation of fertility that allows them to assist in providing for growing children, the human race could not exist. Yet modern medicine treats menopause as a disease requiring treatment with powerful drugs.
The drugs used to "treat" menopause are estrogens, derived from mares' urine (as in Premarin); plant foods (such as soy); or even "natural" estrogens extracted from human urine. They are prescribed to millions of women with the promise of prolonged youth, protection against osteoporosis, relief from vaginal dryness and freedom from hot flashes. According to the popular press, "Estrogen helps keep skin thicker and less wrinkled by slowing the breakdown of collagen."49 How can any forty-ish woman resist such claims?
But the search for the fountain of youth through Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) carries considerable risk. According to the patient insert that comes with Wayerst Laboratories drug Premarin, side effects include nausea and vomiting, breast tenderness or enlargement, enlargement of benign tumors of the uterus, retention of excess fluid that may worsen certain conditions such as asthma, epilepsy, migraine, heart disease or kidney disease, and "a spotty darkening of the skin, particularly on the face." More serious side effects include cancer of the uterus and breast, gallbladder disease and abnormal blood clotting, according to the insert. When these dangers are cited in magazines and newspapers, the most common response is the claim that HRT reduces the risk of heart disease, so much so that this reduction more than compensates for the "slight increase in risk" for breast or uterine cancer. But a 1998 study reported 24 percent more deaths from heart disease in a group of women taking HRT than those taking a placebo.50 These results were not statistically significant but they do suggest that HRT is not protective against heart disease.
To counteract the effects of estrogen therapy, some practitioners are recommending progesterone as an antidote-either in synthetic form or as a "natural" ingredient of various rub-on creams. Because the "natural" progesterones come from plant sources, they are assumed to be safe. But these "natural" progesterones must undergo several synthetic chemical conversions. The soybean product is derived from a sterol compound called stigmasterol, which is then synthesized to progesterone. The yam product is derived from diogenine. Whether rubbed on or taken by mouth, progesterones, like estrogens, can interfere with the body's natural cycle of hormone production. The long-term effects are largely unknown and it is easy to overdose. The amount of progesterone in a cream may vary greatly from one product to another and there is no way of telling how much reaches the bloodstream.51
Not to be outdone in the hormone-meddling activities foisted on the American woman, some clinicians now recommend the addition of androgens-male hormones-to the estrogen cocktail. They cite evidence that these male hormones may improve a woman's energy and mood, reduce breast pain, energize waning libido and protect against osteoporosis, citing "a direct, positive correlation between post menopausal circulating levels of androgens and protection from vertebral crush fractures."52
The truth is that every woman in the world experiences a decline in the level of female hormones and a rise in the level of male hormones at menopause. This is nature's way of equipping the female sex for her new role as forager, worker and sage. Like the male youth of eighteen, she experiences hotbloodedness, signalized by hot flashes, as she prepares for a lustier life than the cloistered one she led as a mother of small children. If she falls for the promises of the estrogen-peddlers, she inhibits the forces that push her into the role of activist and extrovert and throws cold water on the fire that her hormones have set to pry her out of her nest and into the brave new world of adventure and challenge.
Androgens may be given to counteract estrogen-induced mood swings, tender breasts, waning libido and softening bones (claims that estrogens prevent bone loss notwithstanding) but the real question is this: why bother emasculating ourselves with estrogens in the first place? Why second guess our glands by flooding the bloodstream with estrogens at a time when the body doesn't want them? Why not let our own bodies make the sex hormones they need, when they need them and in the quantities that work most efficiently. For the vast majority of women, production of sex hormones is best left to the body's exquisitely tuned endocrine system. Any woman will stay young for a long time if she eats properly and launches herself into a project worthy of her enthusiasm and love.That means, of course, that women must make wise dietary choices so that the endocrine system is properly fed. It means avoiding processed foods and consuming only foods that are dense with nutrients. Modern women must forage just as their ancestors did-forage for nourishing foods in a forest of junk and forage for the truth about nutrition in a briar patch of lies. Like the brave heroines of the fairy tales, women who come to the age of menopause find happiness not by tending the hearth but by venturing into the world to outwit dragons and discover hidden treasures that can be shared with their offspring and their communities. Hormone Replacement Therapy is a tender trap that keeps potential heroines from enjoying the adventures that await them outside their castle walls.
Wise Choices, Healthy BodiesIn primitive societies, women's roles and women's diets were dictated by the tribal culture and did not require the individual woman to exercise her decision-making powers. By contrast, modern society gives us unlimited freedom. Every trip to the grocery store, every visit to the refrigerator presents the opportunity for wise or foolish choices about our diet.
So, too, with how we spend our time. The modern woman has been told that she can do everything-work full time, raise a family, provide meals, keep a household that runs smoothly and peacefully and remain appealing and young. Nature tells us something different. By conferring on women the gift of menopause, nature informs us that mothers of small children need help. They cannot do it all, not in primitive societies, much less in the modern age. The pressures for young women to be both wage-earner and mother can place enormous stress on our bodies at just the stage when our strength is needed for the production and care of healthy children. That stress often leads to disease.
Feminists need not cringe. This is not a summons for women to give over newly won political freedoms or withdraw from the workplace but rather a plea for common sense. The future of both ourselves and our children is best served when full-time careers are delayed until after the childbearing years. And when young mothers are obliged to work full-time, older female relatives-aunts, grandmothers, childless siblings-should be ready to pitch in and help with child-rearing duties. In every family unit, at least one person needs to have the time to prepare nutritious meals, whether mother, father, relative or housekeeper.
Likewise, when children are grown, the wise mother will step back from the mothering role and launch herself into a career or project that takes her out of the home. Then the advice and help she proffers to her daughters and daughters-in-law can be that of friend and sage rather than of interfering nag with too much time on her hands.
The choices women make determine the health of the entire nation. Wise choices in what a woman eats and how she spends her time sustain healthy bodies, healthy children, healthy spouses, healthy households and healthy careers.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: www.westonaprice.org
Natalie Angier, author of Women: An Intimate Biography, points out that the condition of menopause is unique to humans.48 In all other species, the female is fecund throughout her life, able to give birth until the time of death; but human females enjoy a long period in later life in which they are freed from the role of child-bearer.
Actually, menopause occurs in human females for a very practical reason. Human mothers in foraging societies can care for one infant, but because human children develop slowly, they are not able to provide food for themselves and their children when a second child is born. Assistance comes from grandmothers and aunts who no longer bear children and are thus freed up to aid in the nourishment of the younger generation.
Humans differ from other animals in the complexity of their nervous systems, complexity that requires many years to develop. If human females did not experience the cessation of fertility that allows them to assist in providing for growing children, the human race could not exist. Yet modern medicine treats menopause as a disease requiring treatment with powerful drugs.
The drugs used to "treat" menopause are estrogens, derived from mares' urine (as in Premarin); plant foods (such as soy); or even "natural" estrogens extracted from human urine. They are prescribed to millions of women with the promise of prolonged youth, protection against osteoporosis, relief from vaginal dryness and freedom from hot flashes. According to the popular press, "Estrogen helps keep skin thicker and less wrinkled by slowing the breakdown of collagen."49 How can any forty-ish woman resist such claims?
But the search for the fountain of youth through Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) carries considerable risk. According to the patient insert that comes with Wayerst Laboratories drug Premarin, side effects include nausea and vomiting, breast tenderness or enlargement, enlargement of benign tumors of the uterus, retention of excess fluid that may worsen certain conditions such as asthma, epilepsy, migraine, heart disease or kidney disease, and "a spotty darkening of the skin, particularly on the face." More serious side effects include cancer of the uterus and breast, gallbladder disease and abnormal blood clotting, according to the insert. When these dangers are cited in magazines and newspapers, the most common response is the claim that HRT reduces the risk of heart disease, so much so that this reduction more than compensates for the "slight increase in risk" for breast or uterine cancer. But a 1998 study reported 24 percent more deaths from heart disease in a group of women taking HRT than those taking a placebo.50 These results were not statistically significant but they do suggest that HRT is not protective against heart disease.
To counteract the effects of estrogen therapy, some practitioners are recommending progesterone as an antidote-either in synthetic form or as a "natural" ingredient of various rub-on creams. Because the "natural" progesterones come from plant sources, they are assumed to be safe. But these "natural" progesterones must undergo several synthetic chemical conversions. The soybean product is derived from a sterol compound called stigmasterol, which is then synthesized to progesterone. The yam product is derived from diogenine. Whether rubbed on or taken by mouth, progesterones, like estrogens, can interfere with the body's natural cycle of hormone production. The long-term effects are largely unknown and it is easy to overdose. The amount of progesterone in a cream may vary greatly from one product to another and there is no way of telling how much reaches the bloodstream.51
Not to be outdone in the hormone-meddling activities foisted on the American woman, some clinicians now recommend the addition of androgens-male hormones-to the estrogen cocktail. They cite evidence that these male hormones may improve a woman's energy and mood, reduce breast pain, energize waning libido and protect against osteoporosis, citing "a direct, positive correlation between post menopausal circulating levels of androgens and protection from vertebral crush fractures."52
The truth is that every woman in the world experiences a decline in the level of female hormones and a rise in the level of male hormones at menopause. This is nature's way of equipping the female sex for her new role as forager, worker and sage. Like the male youth of eighteen, she experiences hotbloodedness, signalized by hot flashes, as she prepares for a lustier life than the cloistered one she led as a mother of small children. If she falls for the promises of the estrogen-peddlers, she inhibits the forces that push her into the role of activist and extrovert and throws cold water on the fire that her hormones have set to pry her out of her nest and into the brave new world of adventure and challenge.
Androgens may be given to counteract estrogen-induced mood swings, tender breasts, waning libido and softening bones (claims that estrogens prevent bone loss notwithstanding) but the real question is this: why bother emasculating ourselves with estrogens in the first place? Why second guess our glands by flooding the bloodstream with estrogens at a time when the body doesn't want them? Why not let our own bodies make the sex hormones they need, when they need them and in the quantities that work most efficiently. For the vast majority of women, production of sex hormones is best left to the body's exquisitely tuned endocrine system. Any woman will stay young for a long time if she eats properly and launches herself into a project worthy of her enthusiasm and love.That means, of course, that women must make wise dietary choices so that the endocrine system is properly fed. It means avoiding processed foods and consuming only foods that are dense with nutrients. Modern women must forage just as their ancestors did-forage for nourishing foods in a forest of junk and forage for the truth about nutrition in a briar patch of lies. Like the brave heroines of the fairy tales, women who come to the age of menopause find happiness not by tending the hearth but by venturing into the world to outwit dragons and discover hidden treasures that can be shared with their offspring and their communities. Hormone Replacement Therapy is a tender trap that keeps potential heroines from enjoying the adventures that await them outside their castle walls.
Wise Choices, Healthy BodiesIn primitive societies, women's roles and women's diets were dictated by the tribal culture and did not require the individual woman to exercise her decision-making powers. By contrast, modern society gives us unlimited freedom. Every trip to the grocery store, every visit to the refrigerator presents the opportunity for wise or foolish choices about our diet.
So, too, with how we spend our time. The modern woman has been told that she can do everything-work full time, raise a family, provide meals, keep a household that runs smoothly and peacefully and remain appealing and young. Nature tells us something different. By conferring on women the gift of menopause, nature informs us that mothers of small children need help. They cannot do it all, not in primitive societies, much less in the modern age. The pressures for young women to be both wage-earner and mother can place enormous stress on our bodies at just the stage when our strength is needed for the production and care of healthy children. That stress often leads to disease.
Feminists need not cringe. This is not a summons for women to give over newly won political freedoms or withdraw from the workplace but rather a plea for common sense. The future of both ourselves and our children is best served when full-time careers are delayed until after the childbearing years. And when young mothers are obliged to work full-time, older female relatives-aunts, grandmothers, childless siblings-should be ready to pitch in and help with child-rearing duties. In every family unit, at least one person needs to have the time to prepare nutritious meals, whether mother, father, relative or housekeeper.
Likewise, when children are grown, the wise mother will step back from the mothering role and launch herself into a career or project that takes her out of the home. Then the advice and help she proffers to her daughters and daughters-in-law can be that of friend and sage rather than of interfering nag with too much time on her hands.
The choices women make determine the health of the entire nation. Wise choices in what a woman eats and how she spends her time sustain healthy bodies, healthy children, healthy spouses, healthy households and healthy careers.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: www.westonaprice.org
Monday, March 7, 2011
The Soothing Pleasures of a Bath
Energize and Focus
Three spices reminiscent of India work to sharpen your senses and clear your mind. Try this bath to start your day or when you begin a new project.
1 tablespoon powdered ginger
1 tablespoon powdered cinnamon
6 whole cloves
1 large orange sliced
Light red and orange, citrus- or spice-scented candles. Tie the powdered ginger, cinnamon, and cloves in a piece of muslin. Run a warm bath and add the bag of spices. After the bath is full, float the orange slices. Have a cup of iced spice tea or fresh orange juice to sip while you enjoy your bath.
Silk and Satin Skin
This bath, which moisturizes and smoothes rough skin, is perfect in the winter when dry air often makes skin brittle.
1 cup oatmeal
1 cup whole milk
2 cups sugar
Light vanilla or unscented white candles. Run a warm-water bath and add the milk. Tie the oatmeal in an old stocking or a square of cheesecloth and let it float in the bath. Use the sugar to exfoliate by rubbing small handfuls over your skin. Then rub the oatmeal ball on your body to help soothe your skin.
Clear Headed
Some headaches just won't go away no matter what you try. A healing bath may be just what you need to clear your head.
1/4 teaspoon lavender mix
1/4 teaspoon chamomile mix
1/4 teaspoon peppermint mix
Brew a cup of peppermint or chamomile tea to sip while in the tub. Run a hot-water bath. Add all the mixes when the bath is full. Breathe the steam in with long, slow breaths and concentrate on relaxing the muscles in your face.
Three spices reminiscent of India work to sharpen your senses and clear your mind. Try this bath to start your day or when you begin a new project.
1 tablespoon powdered ginger
1 tablespoon powdered cinnamon
6 whole cloves
1 large orange sliced
Light red and orange, citrus- or spice-scented candles. Tie the powdered ginger, cinnamon, and cloves in a piece of muslin. Run a warm bath and add the bag of spices. After the bath is full, float the orange slices. Have a cup of iced spice tea or fresh orange juice to sip while you enjoy your bath.
Silk and Satin Skin
This bath, which moisturizes and smoothes rough skin, is perfect in the winter when dry air often makes skin brittle.
1 cup oatmeal
1 cup whole milk
2 cups sugar
Light vanilla or unscented white candles. Run a warm-water bath and add the milk. Tie the oatmeal in an old stocking or a square of cheesecloth and let it float in the bath. Use the sugar to exfoliate by rubbing small handfuls over your skin. Then rub the oatmeal ball on your body to help soothe your skin.
Clear Headed
Some headaches just won't go away no matter what you try. A healing bath may be just what you need to clear your head.
1/4 teaspoon lavender mix
1/4 teaspoon chamomile mix
1/4 teaspoon peppermint mix
Brew a cup of peppermint or chamomile tea to sip while in the tub. Run a hot-water bath. Add all the mixes when the bath is full. Breathe the steam in with long, slow breaths and concentrate on relaxing the muscles in your face.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Human Fitness vs. Common Fitness; "Actively Survive or Passively Die"
By Ori Hofmekler
One of the most common fitness approaches has been failing miserably. Most people typically attempt to get "less fat" or "less unfit" rather than lean and fit. Most aim at getting "less unhealthy" rather than healthy. Perhaps you too have become accustomed to accept failure as the norm?
Our society is now getting fatter and sicker than ever in spite of the ever growing number of dieters and people who exercise regularly. Something is very wrong with our physical state and most of us aren't even aware of it.
The purpose of this article is to expose the misinformation and fallacies associated with common fitness strategies and present the true fundamental principles upon which human physical conditioning should be based.
My point: human fitness is not a random collection of exercises and it isn't about eating less junk food or popping megadoses of vitamins. Your fitness is created and maintained by a well-defined system. It is rooted in your biology and it's programmed in your genes. Human fitness is based on specific rules, and you need to know how to follow these rules.
Please understand that you possess genes that preserve and develop your muscles, and incredibly, these same genes also extend your life. Your body has an inherent muscle building mechanism that can be activated at any age. And there is no need to force your body to do anything that it isn't programmed for.
The truly exciting news is that there is no need for:
•Drugs or pills
•Wasting time on prolonged gym classes or hours of boring aerobic sessions
•Shoving in freaky amounts of protein all day long
But to turn on your muscle building mechanisms, you need to know what to do. You need to learn what the real triggers of your muscles are, and you need to know how to use these triggers.
So what are these triggers?
What are the facts, and where is the truth?
Facts: Certain nutrition and training protocols have been shown to build muscle, sustain health and promote longevity, whereas other protocols have shown to waste muscle, shatter health and shorten life. But due to a lack of true knowledge, most of us have no clue what to do.
We're largely unaware of what we're doing wrong and we don't even know what we're doing right.
Truth: Cutting through the misinformation and false theories which are so prevalent today, it's becoming more and more critical for us to know who we really are as a species.
You need to know what triggers your body to thrive, what triggers your muscles to develop and what causes them to degrade. When you know how to use the right triggers, you can unleash innate mechanisms that can literally transform pain to power, weakness to strength and sickness to health.
What Triggers Your Body to Thrive?
Your body is equipped with a highly sophisticated metabolic system, committed to one single mission: keeping you alive. And especially keeping you alive during times of adversity. It's amazing how well we're programmed for adversity. Your body is like a "stress converter". It turns pain to power.
Hunger, hardship and pain are the real triggers of your body. This may seem quite alarming for most people today, but nevertheless it's the truth. Challenging your body with these primal triggers is what forces it to adapt and improve. That's the premise of the Pain to Power principle.
Accumulating evidence indicates that your body thrives when challenged with nutritional and physical stress. Indeed both hunger and physical hardships have shown to benefit human survival. And the benefits you get from hunger and hardship seem to be deeply rooted in your biology.
The Pain to Power Principle
The lack of food apparently triggers a survival mechanism that helped humans endure times of food scarcity. And along similar lines, intense exercise bouts benefit you by triggering a primal mechanism that enabled early humans to endure extreme physical hardship.
These inherent mechanisms are part of the human survival apparatus. When triggered, they help you compensate by increasing energy production efficiency, improving body composition, increasing strength and increasing the capacity to resist fatigue and stress. Your survival requires challenge and action. The biological rule is as plain as it's bold:
Actively Survive or Passively Die!
It is now known that the human body evolved to better survive when challenged properly. Both your brain and muscle develop only when adequately stimulated. Yes, we often need to go through painful experiences to develop a skill. That's how soldiers, athletes, doctors and musicians are made. Pain comes with the territory. And the lack of mental or physical hardship can lead to stagnation and degradation.
Indeed, when passive, sedentary or "moderately" challenged, your body goes into waste. And the consequences include muscle degradation, excessive fat gain, chronic disease and a shortened life span.
Aging for instance, is a tissue wasting process.
Can you block this process?
You're certainly equipped with the means to counteract aging, but modern lifestyle and fitness systems are not designed for that.
What's Wrong with Your Fitness?
Nowadays, we don't need to hunt, fight or flee to survive, and hardly do we need to endure hunger. Virtually everything your early ancestors had to struggle for is now readily accessible. But this is the core of the problem.
We have been shifting away from our species' original program, and away from the necessity to actively survive. Typically our bodies are inadequately challenged. And the very stressors that had made our species thrive in the first place, don't apply to us today. These days, humans live "safely" like farm animals. And most of us are overfed and overweight.
So, What's the Solution?
To reclaim your fitness you need to know how to trigger the biological mechanism that preserves and builds your muscles.
Muscle retention is the most critical element of human fitness. Skeletal muscle plays key biological roles in keeping you strong, functional and healthy. Besides force production for physical movements, the muscle participates in the regulation of glucose and lipid metabolism and insulin sensitivity. And it protects you against obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Muscle wasting such as due to lack of adequate exercise, disease or aging, leads to the loss of physical capacity, loss of physical shape and increased risk for chronic disease.
So how do you turn on your muscle building mechanism?
To trigger your innate muscle building mechanism you need to apply the appropriate physical and the nutritional triggers. Both of them are important. If you overlook one of them (by applying the physical triggers, say, without the nutritional triggers), your progress will be compromised.
To understand how all this works in practice, let's first take a look at the body's innate muscle building mechanism.
The Mechanism that Preserves and Builds Your Muscles
New developments in the field of human muscle biology have begun to unravel cellular mechanisms that regulate muscle protein synthesis and breakdown. The key muscle building mechanism in all mammals is a complex protein, part of the insulin pathway, called mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin).
When activated, mTOR signals your muscle to increase protein synthesis. And when it's inhibited, your muscle protein synthesis shuts down, and protein breakdown increases. Note that it's the ratio of protein synthesis/protein breakdown that dictates whether you build or waste muscle.
There are three primary activators of mTOR in your muscle:
1.Growth factors and insulin
2.Amino acids
3.Mechano-overload (such as with weight lifting)
During exercise your mTOR is totally inhibited, but it's reactivated right after exercise and further enhanced by amino acids and insulin. With proper nutrition after exercise, mTOR boosts your muscle protein synthesis to a level that exceeds the rate of protein breakdown, leading to a positive protein balance in the muscle and a net gain of muscle mass.
Interestingly, mTOR responds to fasting in a similar way.
When your body is in a fasting state, mTOR is inhibited and upon feeding, it's reactivated and your muscle shifts from a catabolic to an anabolic state. Accumulating evidence indicates that both exercise and fasting initially cause muscle protein breakdown, but both stimulate protein synthesis after exercise and after feeding, respectively.
It seems that the same mechanism that inhibit protein synthesis during exercise and fasting, contributes to the stimulation of muscle protein anabolism right after.
The Window of Opportunity
mTOR is highly receptive to hormonal stimulation, particularly to insulin and IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1). Note that IGF-1 production is stimulated by growth hormone and intense exercise but it needs insulin interference to finalize its actions. And all this comes into play during the recovery period after exercise.
Right after exercise, insulin can potentially kick in while IGF-1 is already at a peak level. That's the perfect time to feed the muscle and promote muscle gain. Indeed, the post exercise period has been recognized as "the window of opportunity".
Now that you know what triggers the mTOR, let's see what disrupts it.
What Disrupts Your Muscle Building Mechanism?
Since mTOR is part of the insulin pathway, it can be seriously disrupted due to insulin resistance. That's why diabetes is typically associated with muscle wasting. And that's why high glycemic diets (with their insulin shattering effects) are potentially detrimental to muscular development.
You can see why our typical Western diet that is largely based on refined carbohydrate food, has been failing to support your physique. Other disruptors of mTOR include caffeine, nutritional deficiencies and myopathy (muscle inflammatory disease). Note that caffeine inhibits mTOR in a similar manner to exercise.
Meaning: you can have your coffee before exercise but not right after.
So what kind of physical and nutritional triggers activate your mTOR?
Physical Triggers to Build Your Muscle -- Hint it is NOT Aerobics
Researchers have been finding that the main physical trigger for your mTOR is mechano-overload. Mechano-overload is a physical impact that can be achieved by "killer" strength, speed and push & pull drills. Intense killer drills turn on your mTOR to increase protein synthesis in your myofibrils (muscle fibers) and eventually lead to increased muscle size.
In technical terms, the mechano-overload impact on your muscle triggers the release of a cellular compound called phosphatydic acid, which in turn activates your mTOR. Note that moderate exercise and aerobics can't do this. They lack the intensity needed to yield this impact.
Aerobic training affects mainly your mitochondria (the cellular energy facility) but hardly affects your myofibrils. And even though aerobics yields some cardiovascular benefits, it fails to build muscle mass. And quite often, chronic prolonged aerobics drills can actually lead to loss of muscle size and diminished strength.
So is aerobics bad for you?
Researchers in the area of muscle biology and aging have been finding growing evidence that prolonged aerobics training increase the risk of oxidative damage in the muscle. This type of training causes overwhelming accumulation of free radicals in your muscle, which eventually increase the risk of oxidative damage in your tissues (myofibrils and mitochondria). And this risk of oxidative damage becomes increasingly higher as you get older.
On the other hand, intense exercise protocols which are inherently short, have shown to lower this risk. The short intense exercise protocol gives the muscle the time it needs to recuperate and counteract oxidative stress without depleting its antioxidant pool. And again, short intense exercise yield the right impact needed to trigger your mTOR and increase muscle mass.
But there is more to it.
The mechano-overload impact of intense exercise works directly on your fast muscle fibers, the type IIB and the type IIA. It's the fast muscle fibers that enable you to be strong and fast, and they have the largest capacity to generate force and gain size.
You need them when you climb stairs, carry heavy grocery bags, chop wood or move furniture. And if you lose that physical capacity, you lose your ability to live independently.
But the fast muscle fibers are most prone to damage and wasting and they're particularly prone to degradation during the aging process. And only intense exercise can trigger the mechanism that keeps these fibers intact.
Note that the physical triggers are only part of the equation. To build muscle, the physical triggers must be combined with the right nutritional triggers. Inadequate nutrition may lead to loss of muscle size and power regardless to how we exercise.
So what kind of nutritional triggers are needed?
The Nutritional Triggers for Muscle Growth
The main nutritional triggers for mTOR are essential amino acids and particularly the amino acid leucine. Studies reveal that intravenous administration of amino acids increase the rate of muscle protein synthesis after exercise and simultaneously lower the rate of muscle protein breakdown. Dietary protein seems to be the primary factor in muscle nourishment.
Researchers worldwide believe that the diet protocol that benefit human fitness most, is the high protein low carbohydrate diet.
Recent studies have been reporting substantial benefits of the high protein low carbohydrate diet on muscle conditioning and weight loss. A key element in this diet regimen appears to be the high intake of the amino acid leucine, which is part of the branch chain amino acids (leucine, isoleucine and valine).
Besides the stimulation of muscle protein synthesis, leucine has also shown the capacity to modulate insulin and blood sugar. But to further understand how leucine and amino acids regulate muscle buildup, we need to briefly review the role of dietary protein.
The Role of Dietary Protein in Increasing Muscle Growth
The role of dietary protein is to provide the 20 naturally occurring amino acids and especially the nine indispensible/essential amino acids.
Each amino acid has a unique requirement as a building block for body proteins. But some amino acids participate in additional metabolic roles. Most notable among them are the branch chain amino acids, and particularly leucine. Note that besides stimulation of your mTOR, leucine serves as a substrate for your muscle fueling when dietary carbohydrates are not available.
Let's take a closer look at leucine's actions.
Leucine and Muscle Protein Synthesis
Unlike other amino acids, which serve mainly as building blocks for muscle protein, leucine also signals your muscle to increase protein synthesis. Incredibly, leucine has shown to stimulate your muscle protein synthesis, even during times of food restriction or after prolonged physical hardship.
It is the sheer increase in circulating leucine concentration which triggers the mTOR.
On the cellular level, leucine stimulates phosphorylation of an inhibitory protein 4E-BP1 (4E-binding protein 1). And the removal of this inhibitory protein activates initiation factors to induce muscle protein synthesis.
Researchers believe that this unique role of leucine in the regulation of muscle protein synthesis is consistent with the sparing of lean body mass seen with high protein diets during weight loss.
Note that the highest concentrations of leucine and branched chain amino acids (BCAA) are found in dairy products; particularly quality cheese and whey protein. And even though leucine is relatively abundant in our food supply, it is often wasted as an energy substrate or used as a building block rather than an anabolic agent.
This means that to establish the right anabolic environment, you should try to increase leucine consumption beyond maintenance requirements.
But beware that only FOOD BASED leucine can benefit your muscles without side effects. Using leucine as a free form amino acid can be highly counterproductive.
Intravenous administration of free form amino acids including leucine has shown to cause severe hyperglycemic reactions and insulin resistance. Apparently, when free form amino acids are artificially administrated, they rapidly enter the circulation while disrupting insulin function, and impairing your body's glycemic control.
This proves again that we're programmed to benefit from whole food nutrition only.
So how much leucine in the form of foods, NOT supplements, do you need to consume for getting results?
Based on nitrogen-balance measurements, the requirement for leucine to maintain body protein is 1-3 grams daily. And to optimize its anabolic pathway, it has been estimated that leucine requirement should be about 8g - 16g daily.
The following chart presents leucine content in common foods:
Leucine Content in food / per 100g
Whey Protein Concentrate 8.0g
Raw Cheddar Cheese 3.6g
Lean Beef 1.7g
Salmon 1.6g
Almonds 1.5g
Chicken 1.4g
Chick Peas 1.4g
Raw Eggs 1.0g
Egg Yolk 1.4g
Sheep Milk 0.6g
Pork 0.4g
Cow Milk 0.3g
This means that to get the minimum 8 gram leucine requirement for anabolic purposes, you need the following amounts of food:
•a pound and a half of chicken
•three pounds of pork
•over a pound of almonds (over 3000 calories)
•over a pound and a half of raw eggs (16 eggs)
•half a pound of raw cheddar cheese
and remarkably, only 3oz of high-quality whey.
As you can see, whey protein supplementation can effectively allow you to get the minimum leucine you need to build muscle without consuming freaky amounts of food and calories.
Note that the anabolic impact of leucine is proportional to its availability and is dependent on its circulating levels. In other words, the more leucine you consume from food, the better chances for anabolic impact you get.
But there is one more factor that can dictate whether you gain or lose muscle mass. And that's the glycemic factor.
The Glycemic Factor
As noted, the triggering of your mTOR to increase muscle mass requires healthy insulin and glucose homeostasis. Any impairment in the regulation of blood glucose and insulin activity could inactivate your mTOR and jeopardize your muscle protein synthesis.
Studies have reported that dietary protein has beneficial stabilizing effect on insulin levels when entering the circulation from ingested food. In other words, protein food benefits your body's glycemic control. And furthermore, protein serves as a perfect fuel during times of fasting and intense physical hardship.
Protein is Your Perfect Fuel During Intense Training
Amino acids can serve as the ideal muscle fuel during intense exercise. But note that your body uses only certain amino acids for muscle fueling.
As a general rule, a large percentage of dietary amino acids are oxidized before even reaching your circulation. Nearly 100 percent of dietary glutamate and glutamine and nearly 40 percent of phenylalanine are removed during the absorption process, largely by oxidative degeneration.
But the exception to this pattern of protein degradation are the branch chain amino acids (BCAA), with over 80 percent of dietary content of leucine, valine and isoleucine reaching circulation.
It seems that the body spares these amino acids for one purpose: Muscle fueling.
Scientists now know that BCAA and leucine reach your muscle directly to serve as emergency fuel. BCAA contribute carbon to synthesize glucose via the alanine glucose cycle. Called gluconeogenesis, this process converts BCAA into alanine and glutamine which then serve as carbon donors to the production of glucose.
And all this without spiking insulin.
It has been reported that the alanine-glucose cycle accounts for 40 percent of endogenous glucose production during prolonged exercise. Gluconeogenesis occurs mainly in the liver and it grants a perfect supply of glucose to the muscle tissues during fasting and exercise. Your liver releases to the muscles exactly the right amount of glucose needed.
This fueling mechanism is so efficient that it persistently keeps blood sugar from overspiking or overplummeting. In other words, amino acids serve as PRIMARY FUEL during times of intense physical or nutritional stress. They could be the ideal fuel for athletes engaged in non-aerobic drills including weight lifters, wrestlers and mixed martial artists.
That's the right fuel to prevent "hitting the wall".
It's plausible that we evolved to possess this perfect protein fueling mechanism during primordial times when humans were engaged in extreme physical hardship while being on a frugal diet that was primarily low glycemic, devoid of grains and sugar. In fact, this fueling system benefits us only when we're deprived of dietary carbs.
High carb meals shut down this primal fueling mechanism and your body shifts instead to the less effective carbohydrate fuel.
So is Carbohydrate Fuel Bad for You?
Endurance athletes such as long distance runners can certainly benefit from complex carb loading. For aerobics training, complex carbs are certainly a viable fuel. However, there is growing evidence that the human body has not evolved to do well on a high carbohydrate diet. And as we age, we tend to further lose our tolerance to carbohydrate food and particularly to the glycemic load.
Recent studies reveal that the addition of simple carbohydrates to protein supplement negated the anabolic impact of the protein, and blunted muscle protein synthesis in a group of healthy people over 60. These are the facts and we can't afford overlooking them.
One of the major problems with today's fitness is the ignorance towards muscle fueling. We have been shifting away from the primal low glycemic fat/protein fuel into the high glycemic carbohydrate fuel and again, we pay the consequences with ever growing rates of diabetes, obesity and related disorders.
To retain and improve your physical shape, you must shift back to the low glycemic fuel foods you were originally programmed for. And by all means, you should minimize the consumption of high glycemic foods and avoid all sport nutrition and diet products (bars and powders) that are high in sugar or refined carbs.
How Can You Translate All this into Practice?
More studies are needed to fully elucidate the role of nutrition and exercise in supporting your health and physical condition. As for your fitness, there are obviously additional topics which must be addressed.
•How should you combine food?
•What's the right meal timing?
•And how much should you eat per meal?
•When do you need fast assimilating protein?
•And when do you need slow assimilating protein?
•What is the best protein food for your muscle?
•And what's the best protein blend?
•How does the muscle fueling system work?
•Who needs carb fuel?
•Who needs fat fuel?
•Why is training complexity so critical?
•What training regimen protects your neuro-muscular system from degradation?
•How long and how often should you train?
•Can you improve your muscle fibers quality?
•Can you possibly develop a hybrid super muscle fiber?
•And could you adjust our diet/training protocol to counteract aging and prevent muscle wasting?
Obviously there isn't enough space here to cover all this. Nonetheless, we can still draw some important conclusions based on the information in this article.
Following are practical guidelines to the right physical and nutritional protocols.
The Physical Protocol
Train intensely in short intervals. The short intense exercise intervals protocol has shown to improve body composition (build muscle, burn fat) more than the prolonged moderate exercise and aerobics. It has also shown to help counteract muscle aging by retaining fast muscle fibers and increasing the capacity to perform intense, physical tasks.
Avoid long aerobic cardio sessions.
•Incorporate strength and speed exercises with intense push and pull drills to maximize the mechano-overload impact on the muscle. Keep increasing your exercise intensity (weight load, speed and complexity) as you progress to keep your muscles adequately challenged.
•Work your whole body rather than body parts. Isolation exercise have a limited and often limiting effect on your progress.
•Incorporate minimum rest between intervals. This will force your body to improve its durability and strength at the same time.
Remember to keep challenging your body. To do that, rotate your exercise routine; change the order of your exercises and add new elements to your drills.
Incorporate drills that mimic fight or flight activities, such as punches, kicks and sprints. Like other species, we're inherently programmed to improve our physical capacity and resiliency to stress by unlocking this primitive survival apparatus within us.
Avoid moderate exercise. Moderation is fatal to muscular development. High intensity programs like CFT (Controlled Fatigue Training) and Peak 8 are ideal to help improve your fitness level.
The Nutritional Protocol
Follow a high protein, low glycemic diet. Keep a high ratio of protein/carbohydrates to improve body composition.
Here are a few other key points:
•Increase your intake of leucine rich foods such as high quality whey protein, raw cheese and organic, pasture-raised eggs.
•Increase the gap between meals to potentiate the anabolic effect of each meal. Remember, fasting stimulates a substantial peak in muscle protein synthesis when feeding is resumed.
•Feed your muscle with quality whey protein after exercise. Make sure the whey protein is derived from grass fed cows and is cold processed. Note that whey protein is the fastest to assimilate among all protein foods. Its anabolic impact after exercise is unmatched. Whey protein is also ideal for muscle fueling before exercise. It has the highest content of leucine and BCAA among all foods.
For best results, incorporate at least two recovery meals after exercise / 20g-30g protein per meal. 20g is about the threshold amount of protein needed to grant maximum utilization efficiency without wasting nitrogen.
Keep 1-3 hours gap between meals (depends on meal size).
Make all your muscle meals low glycemic. Avoid protein bars and powders made with added sugar. Note that mixing whey protein with low glycemic fruits such as berries is ok. This will not cause a substantial increase in the glycemic load of your meal.
Additionally:
•Increase your intake of antioxidants from fruits and vegetables to support your muscle antioxidant defenses and allow recuperation and buildup.
•Stay away from any product made with added fructose. Fructose is the worst fuel for your muscles.
•Start your morning with a whey protein meal to cover your minimum leucine requirement. This will allow all additional protein meals to become increasingly anabolic (by releasing extra leucine for anabolic purposes).
•Use whey meals as a primary source of protein during the day to grant maximum protein/leucine loading efficiency with minimum digestive stress.
•Have your slow assimilating proteins (eggs, cheese, fish or meat) at night to grant a steady release of leucine and a long lasting anabolic impact during the sleeping hours.
•One way to spare leucine for anabolic purposes is by adding coconuts' MCT (medium chain triglycerides) to a whey protein meal. MCT has shown the capacity to swiftly convert to energy without spiking insulin and without the need for bile acid digestion. MCT can help shift leucine's pathway from fueling into muscle building.
•Keep your diet clean from chemicals, pesticides and preservatives to minimize the metabolic stress on your body. Accumulated metabolic stress and toxicity present major obstacles to muscle recuperation and buildup.
Final Note
Life isn't just about looking hard and feeling strong. And often you get too busy to pay attention to how you eat or exercise. Nevertheless, with the right knowledge and practice, you can become increasingly efficient in restoring and improving your physical shape even when your available time is scarce.
The protocols suggested here can fit any lifestyle. Even 10 minutes of intense exercise can still yield positive results while you're on a super busy schedule. And you can easily pre-pack whey protein in your bag or case and bring it with you anywhere you go. Life requires you to act.
The choice is now in your hands.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the Author
Ori Hofmekler is the author of The Warrior Diet, The Anti-Estrogenic Diet, Maximum Muscle Minimum Fat, and the upcoming book Unlocking the Muscle Gene/North Atlantic Books.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the most common fitness approaches has been failing miserably. Most people typically attempt to get "less fat" or "less unfit" rather than lean and fit. Most aim at getting "less unhealthy" rather than healthy. Perhaps you too have become accustomed to accept failure as the norm?
Our society is now getting fatter and sicker than ever in spite of the ever growing number of dieters and people who exercise regularly. Something is very wrong with our physical state and most of us aren't even aware of it.
The purpose of this article is to expose the misinformation and fallacies associated with common fitness strategies and present the true fundamental principles upon which human physical conditioning should be based.
My point: human fitness is not a random collection of exercises and it isn't about eating less junk food or popping megadoses of vitamins. Your fitness is created and maintained by a well-defined system. It is rooted in your biology and it's programmed in your genes. Human fitness is based on specific rules, and you need to know how to follow these rules.
Please understand that you possess genes that preserve and develop your muscles, and incredibly, these same genes also extend your life. Your body has an inherent muscle building mechanism that can be activated at any age. And there is no need to force your body to do anything that it isn't programmed for.
The truly exciting news is that there is no need for:
•Drugs or pills
•Wasting time on prolonged gym classes or hours of boring aerobic sessions
•Shoving in freaky amounts of protein all day long
But to turn on your muscle building mechanisms, you need to know what to do. You need to learn what the real triggers of your muscles are, and you need to know how to use these triggers.
So what are these triggers?
What are the facts, and where is the truth?
Facts: Certain nutrition and training protocols have been shown to build muscle, sustain health and promote longevity, whereas other protocols have shown to waste muscle, shatter health and shorten life. But due to a lack of true knowledge, most of us have no clue what to do.
We're largely unaware of what we're doing wrong and we don't even know what we're doing right.
Truth: Cutting through the misinformation and false theories which are so prevalent today, it's becoming more and more critical for us to know who we really are as a species.
You need to know what triggers your body to thrive, what triggers your muscles to develop and what causes them to degrade. When you know how to use the right triggers, you can unleash innate mechanisms that can literally transform pain to power, weakness to strength and sickness to health.
What Triggers Your Body to Thrive?
Your body is equipped with a highly sophisticated metabolic system, committed to one single mission: keeping you alive. And especially keeping you alive during times of adversity. It's amazing how well we're programmed for adversity. Your body is like a "stress converter". It turns pain to power.
Hunger, hardship and pain are the real triggers of your body. This may seem quite alarming for most people today, but nevertheless it's the truth. Challenging your body with these primal triggers is what forces it to adapt and improve. That's the premise of the Pain to Power principle.
Accumulating evidence indicates that your body thrives when challenged with nutritional and physical stress. Indeed both hunger and physical hardships have shown to benefit human survival. And the benefits you get from hunger and hardship seem to be deeply rooted in your biology.
The Pain to Power Principle
The lack of food apparently triggers a survival mechanism that helped humans endure times of food scarcity. And along similar lines, intense exercise bouts benefit you by triggering a primal mechanism that enabled early humans to endure extreme physical hardship.
These inherent mechanisms are part of the human survival apparatus. When triggered, they help you compensate by increasing energy production efficiency, improving body composition, increasing strength and increasing the capacity to resist fatigue and stress. Your survival requires challenge and action. The biological rule is as plain as it's bold:
Actively Survive or Passively Die!
It is now known that the human body evolved to better survive when challenged properly. Both your brain and muscle develop only when adequately stimulated. Yes, we often need to go through painful experiences to develop a skill. That's how soldiers, athletes, doctors and musicians are made. Pain comes with the territory. And the lack of mental or physical hardship can lead to stagnation and degradation.
Indeed, when passive, sedentary or "moderately" challenged, your body goes into waste. And the consequences include muscle degradation, excessive fat gain, chronic disease and a shortened life span.
Aging for instance, is a tissue wasting process.
Can you block this process?
You're certainly equipped with the means to counteract aging, but modern lifestyle and fitness systems are not designed for that.
What's Wrong with Your Fitness?
Nowadays, we don't need to hunt, fight or flee to survive, and hardly do we need to endure hunger. Virtually everything your early ancestors had to struggle for is now readily accessible. But this is the core of the problem.
We have been shifting away from our species' original program, and away from the necessity to actively survive. Typically our bodies are inadequately challenged. And the very stressors that had made our species thrive in the first place, don't apply to us today. These days, humans live "safely" like farm animals. And most of us are overfed and overweight.
So, What's the Solution?
To reclaim your fitness you need to know how to trigger the biological mechanism that preserves and builds your muscles.
Muscle retention is the most critical element of human fitness. Skeletal muscle plays key biological roles in keeping you strong, functional and healthy. Besides force production for physical movements, the muscle participates in the regulation of glucose and lipid metabolism and insulin sensitivity. And it protects you against obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Muscle wasting such as due to lack of adequate exercise, disease or aging, leads to the loss of physical capacity, loss of physical shape and increased risk for chronic disease.
So how do you turn on your muscle building mechanism?
To trigger your innate muscle building mechanism you need to apply the appropriate physical and the nutritional triggers. Both of them are important. If you overlook one of them (by applying the physical triggers, say, without the nutritional triggers), your progress will be compromised.
To understand how all this works in practice, let's first take a look at the body's innate muscle building mechanism.
The Mechanism that Preserves and Builds Your Muscles
New developments in the field of human muscle biology have begun to unravel cellular mechanisms that regulate muscle protein synthesis and breakdown. The key muscle building mechanism in all mammals is a complex protein, part of the insulin pathway, called mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin).
When activated, mTOR signals your muscle to increase protein synthesis. And when it's inhibited, your muscle protein synthesis shuts down, and protein breakdown increases. Note that it's the ratio of protein synthesis/protein breakdown that dictates whether you build or waste muscle.
There are three primary activators of mTOR in your muscle:
1.Growth factors and insulin
2.Amino acids
3.Mechano-overload (such as with weight lifting)
During exercise your mTOR is totally inhibited, but it's reactivated right after exercise and further enhanced by amino acids and insulin. With proper nutrition after exercise, mTOR boosts your muscle protein synthesis to a level that exceeds the rate of protein breakdown, leading to a positive protein balance in the muscle and a net gain of muscle mass.
Interestingly, mTOR responds to fasting in a similar way.
When your body is in a fasting state, mTOR is inhibited and upon feeding, it's reactivated and your muscle shifts from a catabolic to an anabolic state. Accumulating evidence indicates that both exercise and fasting initially cause muscle protein breakdown, but both stimulate protein synthesis after exercise and after feeding, respectively.
It seems that the same mechanism that inhibit protein synthesis during exercise and fasting, contributes to the stimulation of muscle protein anabolism right after.
The Window of Opportunity
mTOR is highly receptive to hormonal stimulation, particularly to insulin and IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1). Note that IGF-1 production is stimulated by growth hormone and intense exercise but it needs insulin interference to finalize its actions. And all this comes into play during the recovery period after exercise.
Right after exercise, insulin can potentially kick in while IGF-1 is already at a peak level. That's the perfect time to feed the muscle and promote muscle gain. Indeed, the post exercise period has been recognized as "the window of opportunity".
Now that you know what triggers the mTOR, let's see what disrupts it.
What Disrupts Your Muscle Building Mechanism?
Since mTOR is part of the insulin pathway, it can be seriously disrupted due to insulin resistance. That's why diabetes is typically associated with muscle wasting. And that's why high glycemic diets (with their insulin shattering effects) are potentially detrimental to muscular development.
You can see why our typical Western diet that is largely based on refined carbohydrate food, has been failing to support your physique. Other disruptors of mTOR include caffeine, nutritional deficiencies and myopathy (muscle inflammatory disease). Note that caffeine inhibits mTOR in a similar manner to exercise.
Meaning: you can have your coffee before exercise but not right after.
So what kind of physical and nutritional triggers activate your mTOR?
Physical Triggers to Build Your Muscle -- Hint it is NOT Aerobics
Researchers have been finding that the main physical trigger for your mTOR is mechano-overload. Mechano-overload is a physical impact that can be achieved by "killer" strength, speed and push & pull drills. Intense killer drills turn on your mTOR to increase protein synthesis in your myofibrils (muscle fibers) and eventually lead to increased muscle size.
In technical terms, the mechano-overload impact on your muscle triggers the release of a cellular compound called phosphatydic acid, which in turn activates your mTOR. Note that moderate exercise and aerobics can't do this. They lack the intensity needed to yield this impact.
Aerobic training affects mainly your mitochondria (the cellular energy facility) but hardly affects your myofibrils. And even though aerobics yields some cardiovascular benefits, it fails to build muscle mass. And quite often, chronic prolonged aerobics drills can actually lead to loss of muscle size and diminished strength.
So is aerobics bad for you?
Researchers in the area of muscle biology and aging have been finding growing evidence that prolonged aerobics training increase the risk of oxidative damage in the muscle. This type of training causes overwhelming accumulation of free radicals in your muscle, which eventually increase the risk of oxidative damage in your tissues (myofibrils and mitochondria). And this risk of oxidative damage becomes increasingly higher as you get older.
On the other hand, intense exercise protocols which are inherently short, have shown to lower this risk. The short intense exercise protocol gives the muscle the time it needs to recuperate and counteract oxidative stress without depleting its antioxidant pool. And again, short intense exercise yield the right impact needed to trigger your mTOR and increase muscle mass.
But there is more to it.
The mechano-overload impact of intense exercise works directly on your fast muscle fibers, the type IIB and the type IIA. It's the fast muscle fibers that enable you to be strong and fast, and they have the largest capacity to generate force and gain size.
You need them when you climb stairs, carry heavy grocery bags, chop wood or move furniture. And if you lose that physical capacity, you lose your ability to live independently.
But the fast muscle fibers are most prone to damage and wasting and they're particularly prone to degradation during the aging process. And only intense exercise can trigger the mechanism that keeps these fibers intact.
Note that the physical triggers are only part of the equation. To build muscle, the physical triggers must be combined with the right nutritional triggers. Inadequate nutrition may lead to loss of muscle size and power regardless to how we exercise.
So what kind of nutritional triggers are needed?
The Nutritional Triggers for Muscle Growth
The main nutritional triggers for mTOR are essential amino acids and particularly the amino acid leucine. Studies reveal that intravenous administration of amino acids increase the rate of muscle protein synthesis after exercise and simultaneously lower the rate of muscle protein breakdown. Dietary protein seems to be the primary factor in muscle nourishment.
Researchers worldwide believe that the diet protocol that benefit human fitness most, is the high protein low carbohydrate diet.
Recent studies have been reporting substantial benefits of the high protein low carbohydrate diet on muscle conditioning and weight loss. A key element in this diet regimen appears to be the high intake of the amino acid leucine, which is part of the branch chain amino acids (leucine, isoleucine and valine).
Besides the stimulation of muscle protein synthesis, leucine has also shown the capacity to modulate insulin and blood sugar. But to further understand how leucine and amino acids regulate muscle buildup, we need to briefly review the role of dietary protein.
The Role of Dietary Protein in Increasing Muscle Growth
The role of dietary protein is to provide the 20 naturally occurring amino acids and especially the nine indispensible/essential amino acids.
Each amino acid has a unique requirement as a building block for body proteins. But some amino acids participate in additional metabolic roles. Most notable among them are the branch chain amino acids, and particularly leucine. Note that besides stimulation of your mTOR, leucine serves as a substrate for your muscle fueling when dietary carbohydrates are not available.
Let's take a closer look at leucine's actions.
Leucine and Muscle Protein Synthesis
Unlike other amino acids, which serve mainly as building blocks for muscle protein, leucine also signals your muscle to increase protein synthesis. Incredibly, leucine has shown to stimulate your muscle protein synthesis, even during times of food restriction or after prolonged physical hardship.
It is the sheer increase in circulating leucine concentration which triggers the mTOR.
On the cellular level, leucine stimulates phosphorylation of an inhibitory protein 4E-BP1 (4E-binding protein 1). And the removal of this inhibitory protein activates initiation factors to induce muscle protein synthesis.
Researchers believe that this unique role of leucine in the regulation of muscle protein synthesis is consistent with the sparing of lean body mass seen with high protein diets during weight loss.
Note that the highest concentrations of leucine and branched chain amino acids (BCAA) are found in dairy products; particularly quality cheese and whey protein. And even though leucine is relatively abundant in our food supply, it is often wasted as an energy substrate or used as a building block rather than an anabolic agent.
This means that to establish the right anabolic environment, you should try to increase leucine consumption beyond maintenance requirements.
But beware that only FOOD BASED leucine can benefit your muscles without side effects. Using leucine as a free form amino acid can be highly counterproductive.
Intravenous administration of free form amino acids including leucine has shown to cause severe hyperglycemic reactions and insulin resistance. Apparently, when free form amino acids are artificially administrated, they rapidly enter the circulation while disrupting insulin function, and impairing your body's glycemic control.
This proves again that we're programmed to benefit from whole food nutrition only.
So how much leucine in the form of foods, NOT supplements, do you need to consume for getting results?
Based on nitrogen-balance measurements, the requirement for leucine to maintain body protein is 1-3 grams daily. And to optimize its anabolic pathway, it has been estimated that leucine requirement should be about 8g - 16g daily.
The following chart presents leucine content in common foods:
Leucine Content in food / per 100g
Whey Protein Concentrate 8.0g
Raw Cheddar Cheese 3.6g
Lean Beef 1.7g
Salmon 1.6g
Almonds 1.5g
Chicken 1.4g
Chick Peas 1.4g
Raw Eggs 1.0g
Egg Yolk 1.4g
Sheep Milk 0.6g
Pork 0.4g
Cow Milk 0.3g
This means that to get the minimum 8 gram leucine requirement for anabolic purposes, you need the following amounts of food:
•a pound and a half of chicken
•three pounds of pork
•over a pound of almonds (over 3000 calories)
•over a pound and a half of raw eggs (16 eggs)
•half a pound of raw cheddar cheese
and remarkably, only 3oz of high-quality whey.
As you can see, whey protein supplementation can effectively allow you to get the minimum leucine you need to build muscle without consuming freaky amounts of food and calories.
Note that the anabolic impact of leucine is proportional to its availability and is dependent on its circulating levels. In other words, the more leucine you consume from food, the better chances for anabolic impact you get.
But there is one more factor that can dictate whether you gain or lose muscle mass. And that's the glycemic factor.
The Glycemic Factor
As noted, the triggering of your mTOR to increase muscle mass requires healthy insulin and glucose homeostasis. Any impairment in the regulation of blood glucose and insulin activity could inactivate your mTOR and jeopardize your muscle protein synthesis.
Studies have reported that dietary protein has beneficial stabilizing effect on insulin levels when entering the circulation from ingested food. In other words, protein food benefits your body's glycemic control. And furthermore, protein serves as a perfect fuel during times of fasting and intense physical hardship.
Protein is Your Perfect Fuel During Intense Training
Amino acids can serve as the ideal muscle fuel during intense exercise. But note that your body uses only certain amino acids for muscle fueling.
As a general rule, a large percentage of dietary amino acids are oxidized before even reaching your circulation. Nearly 100 percent of dietary glutamate and glutamine and nearly 40 percent of phenylalanine are removed during the absorption process, largely by oxidative degeneration.
But the exception to this pattern of protein degradation are the branch chain amino acids (BCAA), with over 80 percent of dietary content of leucine, valine and isoleucine reaching circulation.
It seems that the body spares these amino acids for one purpose: Muscle fueling.
Scientists now know that BCAA and leucine reach your muscle directly to serve as emergency fuel. BCAA contribute carbon to synthesize glucose via the alanine glucose cycle. Called gluconeogenesis, this process converts BCAA into alanine and glutamine which then serve as carbon donors to the production of glucose.
And all this without spiking insulin.
It has been reported that the alanine-glucose cycle accounts for 40 percent of endogenous glucose production during prolonged exercise. Gluconeogenesis occurs mainly in the liver and it grants a perfect supply of glucose to the muscle tissues during fasting and exercise. Your liver releases to the muscles exactly the right amount of glucose needed.
This fueling mechanism is so efficient that it persistently keeps blood sugar from overspiking or overplummeting. In other words, amino acids serve as PRIMARY FUEL during times of intense physical or nutritional stress. They could be the ideal fuel for athletes engaged in non-aerobic drills including weight lifters, wrestlers and mixed martial artists.
That's the right fuel to prevent "hitting the wall".
It's plausible that we evolved to possess this perfect protein fueling mechanism during primordial times when humans were engaged in extreme physical hardship while being on a frugal diet that was primarily low glycemic, devoid of grains and sugar. In fact, this fueling system benefits us only when we're deprived of dietary carbs.
High carb meals shut down this primal fueling mechanism and your body shifts instead to the less effective carbohydrate fuel.
So is Carbohydrate Fuel Bad for You?
Endurance athletes such as long distance runners can certainly benefit from complex carb loading. For aerobics training, complex carbs are certainly a viable fuel. However, there is growing evidence that the human body has not evolved to do well on a high carbohydrate diet. And as we age, we tend to further lose our tolerance to carbohydrate food and particularly to the glycemic load.
Recent studies reveal that the addition of simple carbohydrates to protein supplement negated the anabolic impact of the protein, and blunted muscle protein synthesis in a group of healthy people over 60. These are the facts and we can't afford overlooking them.
One of the major problems with today's fitness is the ignorance towards muscle fueling. We have been shifting away from the primal low glycemic fat/protein fuel into the high glycemic carbohydrate fuel and again, we pay the consequences with ever growing rates of diabetes, obesity and related disorders.
To retain and improve your physical shape, you must shift back to the low glycemic fuel foods you were originally programmed for. And by all means, you should minimize the consumption of high glycemic foods and avoid all sport nutrition and diet products (bars and powders) that are high in sugar or refined carbs.
How Can You Translate All this into Practice?
More studies are needed to fully elucidate the role of nutrition and exercise in supporting your health and physical condition. As for your fitness, there are obviously additional topics which must be addressed.
•How should you combine food?
•What's the right meal timing?
•And how much should you eat per meal?
•When do you need fast assimilating protein?
•And when do you need slow assimilating protein?
•What is the best protein food for your muscle?
•And what's the best protein blend?
•How does the muscle fueling system work?
•Who needs carb fuel?
•Who needs fat fuel?
•Why is training complexity so critical?
•What training regimen protects your neuro-muscular system from degradation?
•How long and how often should you train?
•Can you improve your muscle fibers quality?
•Can you possibly develop a hybrid super muscle fiber?
•And could you adjust our diet/training protocol to counteract aging and prevent muscle wasting?
Obviously there isn't enough space here to cover all this. Nonetheless, we can still draw some important conclusions based on the information in this article.
Following are practical guidelines to the right physical and nutritional protocols.
The Physical Protocol
Train intensely in short intervals. The short intense exercise intervals protocol has shown to improve body composition (build muscle, burn fat) more than the prolonged moderate exercise and aerobics. It has also shown to help counteract muscle aging by retaining fast muscle fibers and increasing the capacity to perform intense, physical tasks.
Avoid long aerobic cardio sessions.
•Incorporate strength and speed exercises with intense push and pull drills to maximize the mechano-overload impact on the muscle. Keep increasing your exercise intensity (weight load, speed and complexity) as you progress to keep your muscles adequately challenged.
•Work your whole body rather than body parts. Isolation exercise have a limited and often limiting effect on your progress.
•Incorporate minimum rest between intervals. This will force your body to improve its durability and strength at the same time.
Remember to keep challenging your body. To do that, rotate your exercise routine; change the order of your exercises and add new elements to your drills.
Incorporate drills that mimic fight or flight activities, such as punches, kicks and sprints. Like other species, we're inherently programmed to improve our physical capacity and resiliency to stress by unlocking this primitive survival apparatus within us.
Avoid moderate exercise. Moderation is fatal to muscular development. High intensity programs like CFT (Controlled Fatigue Training) and Peak 8 are ideal to help improve your fitness level.
The Nutritional Protocol
Follow a high protein, low glycemic diet. Keep a high ratio of protein/carbohydrates to improve body composition.
Here are a few other key points:
•Increase your intake of leucine rich foods such as high quality whey protein, raw cheese and organic, pasture-raised eggs.
•Increase the gap between meals to potentiate the anabolic effect of each meal. Remember, fasting stimulates a substantial peak in muscle protein synthesis when feeding is resumed.
•Feed your muscle with quality whey protein after exercise. Make sure the whey protein is derived from grass fed cows and is cold processed. Note that whey protein is the fastest to assimilate among all protein foods. Its anabolic impact after exercise is unmatched. Whey protein is also ideal for muscle fueling before exercise. It has the highest content of leucine and BCAA among all foods.
For best results, incorporate at least two recovery meals after exercise / 20g-30g protein per meal. 20g is about the threshold amount of protein needed to grant maximum utilization efficiency without wasting nitrogen.
Keep 1-3 hours gap between meals (depends on meal size).
Make all your muscle meals low glycemic. Avoid protein bars and powders made with added sugar. Note that mixing whey protein with low glycemic fruits such as berries is ok. This will not cause a substantial increase in the glycemic load of your meal.
Additionally:
•Increase your intake of antioxidants from fruits and vegetables to support your muscle antioxidant defenses and allow recuperation and buildup.
•Stay away from any product made with added fructose. Fructose is the worst fuel for your muscles.
•Start your morning with a whey protein meal to cover your minimum leucine requirement. This will allow all additional protein meals to become increasingly anabolic (by releasing extra leucine for anabolic purposes).
•Use whey meals as a primary source of protein during the day to grant maximum protein/leucine loading efficiency with minimum digestive stress.
•Have your slow assimilating proteins (eggs, cheese, fish or meat) at night to grant a steady release of leucine and a long lasting anabolic impact during the sleeping hours.
•One way to spare leucine for anabolic purposes is by adding coconuts' MCT (medium chain triglycerides) to a whey protein meal. MCT has shown the capacity to swiftly convert to energy without spiking insulin and without the need for bile acid digestion. MCT can help shift leucine's pathway from fueling into muscle building.
•Keep your diet clean from chemicals, pesticides and preservatives to minimize the metabolic stress on your body. Accumulated metabolic stress and toxicity present major obstacles to muscle recuperation and buildup.
Final Note
Life isn't just about looking hard and feeling strong. And often you get too busy to pay attention to how you eat or exercise. Nevertheless, with the right knowledge and practice, you can become increasingly efficient in restoring and improving your physical shape even when your available time is scarce.
The protocols suggested here can fit any lifestyle. Even 10 minutes of intense exercise can still yield positive results while you're on a super busy schedule. And you can easily pre-pack whey protein in your bag or case and bring it with you anywhere you go. Life requires you to act.
The choice is now in your hands.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the Author
Ori Hofmekler is the author of The Warrior Diet, The Anti-Estrogenic Diet, Maximum Muscle Minimum Fat, and the upcoming book Unlocking the Muscle Gene/North Atlantic Books.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
I stumbled across this piece today on her passionate homemaking blog and found it very interesting.
4 Items You Don’t Need In Your Bathroom
by Lindsay on Mar 19, 2010 in frugal & simple, natural & green
Here are four standard bathroom products that you can eliminate rather easily. Yes, the market tries to persuade you that you need this and that for the best look or feel. But are they truly all necessary? Here is your opportunity to fight back!
1. Shaving Cream
What is the purpose of shaving cream? Supposedly, it is to protect you from cutting yourself while shaving, correct? So I thought, until I really evaluated whether or not it served its purpose. Maybe 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time I would get cut, scratched, or hurt in some way. Both my husband and I shared this experience. Then I decided there had to be some way I could just live without it.
Alternative #1: Hair Conditioner. Conditioner is a perfectly useful alternative to shaving cream, and yet it clogs the razor and dulls the blade quicker. And as you will see in #2, we’ve eliminated this product, so its no longer an option at our home.
Alternative #2: Bar of Soap. Yes, the simplicity of a bar of soap does the trick! Scrub yourself down and shave in the process and you just eliminated another purchase for your bathroom. Guess what? My husband prefers this method too. We both agree that we cut ourselves far less, our skin remains soft and moistened, and we get a perfectly clean shave. My technique in order to avoid extra waste is to lather up one leg with soap, and before washing it off, I shave immediately, and then wash down. This works to help use the least amount of soap possible for both jobs of washing and shaving. We recommend a good natural bar of soap such as Dr Bronners.
Alternative #3: Nothing. Some would argue that you can use a little water and go for it (but I personally prefer the soap).
Save yourself a few dollars each month and take it off the list. It works.
2. Hair Conditioner
Hair conditioner is a nice product to have. It does help produce that silky smooth appearance. But is it necessary? We’ve lived without it for quite some time.
Alternative #1: Apple cider vinegar (Approximately 1-2 Tbls. cider to 1 cup water). If you don’t mind the fragrance, try a squirt of apple cider vinegar in your hair for its natural de-tangling ability. Or add a bit of essential oils to balance out the scent.
Alternative #2: Coconut oil. Applying coconut oil after showering as a leave in conditioner is very effective. It can be used as a curling gel for my hair, or a smooth gel for my husbands hair. Just remember…a little dab will do you. Too much and you can have a greasy look. It is wonderfully nourishing for the hair.
Save yourself a few dollars and use something you already have or skip it altogether.
3. Make-up Remover
Alternative #1: Soap and water. Yes, it works quite nicely.
Alternative #2: Coconut oil. Apply a little coconut oil to a cotton ball and apply to eyelashes to remove mascara and all other products on your face. Moisten your skin while removing make-up at the same time.
4. Aftershave
Alternative #1: Shea Butter / Coconut oil Combo. Check out our homemade aftershave recipe. (The hubby thinks this works the best!)
Alternative #2: Coconut oil (surprise!). While not as soothing as the combo above, coconut oil makes a great alternative in a pinch.
I could go on to share how you can also make your own shampoo or go the no-poo/baking soda route, how to make an effective homemade deodorant, and so on, but we’ve already been there before. Check out all the wonderful uses for coconut oil that we have compiled for further inspiration.
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays.
What items have you eliminated in your bathroom? What creative alternatives have you discovered?
4 Items You Don’t Need In Your Bathroom
by Lindsay on Mar 19, 2010 in frugal & simple, natural & green
Here are four standard bathroom products that you can eliminate rather easily. Yes, the market tries to persuade you that you need this and that for the best look or feel. But are they truly all necessary? Here is your opportunity to fight back!
1. Shaving Cream
What is the purpose of shaving cream? Supposedly, it is to protect you from cutting yourself while shaving, correct? So I thought, until I really evaluated whether or not it served its purpose. Maybe 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time I would get cut, scratched, or hurt in some way. Both my husband and I shared this experience. Then I decided there had to be some way I could just live without it.
Alternative #1: Hair Conditioner. Conditioner is a perfectly useful alternative to shaving cream, and yet it clogs the razor and dulls the blade quicker. And as you will see in #2, we’ve eliminated this product, so its no longer an option at our home.
Alternative #2: Bar of Soap. Yes, the simplicity of a bar of soap does the trick! Scrub yourself down and shave in the process and you just eliminated another purchase for your bathroom. Guess what? My husband prefers this method too. We both agree that we cut ourselves far less, our skin remains soft and moistened, and we get a perfectly clean shave. My technique in order to avoid extra waste is to lather up one leg with soap, and before washing it off, I shave immediately, and then wash down. This works to help use the least amount of soap possible for both jobs of washing and shaving. We recommend a good natural bar of soap such as Dr Bronners.
Alternative #3: Nothing. Some would argue that you can use a little water and go for it (but I personally prefer the soap).
Save yourself a few dollars each month and take it off the list. It works.
2. Hair Conditioner
Hair conditioner is a nice product to have. It does help produce that silky smooth appearance. But is it necessary? We’ve lived without it for quite some time.
Alternative #1: Apple cider vinegar (Approximately 1-2 Tbls. cider to 1 cup water). If you don’t mind the fragrance, try a squirt of apple cider vinegar in your hair for its natural de-tangling ability. Or add a bit of essential oils to balance out the scent.
Alternative #2: Coconut oil. Applying coconut oil after showering as a leave in conditioner is very effective. It can be used as a curling gel for my hair, or a smooth gel for my husbands hair. Just remember…a little dab will do you. Too much and you can have a greasy look. It is wonderfully nourishing for the hair.
Save yourself a few dollars and use something you already have or skip it altogether.
3. Make-up Remover
Alternative #1: Soap and water. Yes, it works quite nicely.
Alternative #2: Coconut oil. Apply a little coconut oil to a cotton ball and apply to eyelashes to remove mascara and all other products on your face. Moisten your skin while removing make-up at the same time.
4. Aftershave
Alternative #1: Shea Butter / Coconut oil Combo. Check out our homemade aftershave recipe. (The hubby thinks this works the best!)
Alternative #2: Coconut oil (surprise!). While not as soothing as the combo above, coconut oil makes a great alternative in a pinch.
I could go on to share how you can also make your own shampoo or go the no-poo/baking soda route, how to make an effective homemade deodorant, and so on, but we’ve already been there before. Check out all the wonderful uses for coconut oil that we have compiled for further inspiration.
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays.
What items have you eliminated in your bathroom? What creative alternatives have you discovered?
Read any good books lately?...
Everything I Want to Do is Illegal by Joel Salatin
Book Reviews - Thumbs Up Reviews
A Thumbs Up Book Review
Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front
By Joel Salatin Polyface
Publications, 2007
Reviewed by Katherine Czapp
“The instant I enter on my own land, the bright ideas of property, of exclusive right, of independence, exalt my mind. Precious soil, I say to myself, by what singular custom of law is it that thou wast made to constitute the riches of the freeholder? What should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of that soil? It feeds, it clothes us; from it we draw even a great exuberancy, our best meat, our richest drink; the very honey of our bees comes from this privileged spot. No wonder we should thus cherish its possession. . . it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as individuals of such a district. These images, I must confess, I always behold with pleasure and extend them as far as my imagination can reach; for this is what may be called the true and only philosophy of an American farmer.”
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a naturalized American citizen of French heritage wrote this rhapsodic hymn of the early American freeholder that became part of his Letters from an American Farmer, published in London in 1782. The book immediately became the first American literary success in Europe, and was translated into several languages; its author became a celebrated figure. Old Europe was keenly curious about the new American experiment in which equal opportunity and self-determination were the guiding lights of the new nation’s social structure, along with its utter rejection of the feudal tyranny of monarchist regimes.
“It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufactures employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. . . . We are a people of cultivators scattered over an immense terrain. . . united by the silken bands of a mild government, all respecting the laws without dreading their power because they are equitable. . . . We have no princes for whom we toil, starve and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world.”
Crèvecoeur spent several peaceful and prosperous years on his farm in New York, living the ideal shared by Thomas Jefferson and others who believed that a truly self-governing, democratic society must be composed largely of small, independent farmers. In fact, Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, also published in 1782, insisted that agriculture, not manufacturing, should form the economic basis of the new nation (although, prophetically for the nation, he was to change his mind after the War of 1812). Working directly with nature, “looking up to heaven and [down] to their own soil and industry,” instilled in these citizen-farmers the very qualities of independence, equity and justice for which the new republic ideally aimed.
These shining principles, of course, never quite became reality, and Crèvecoeur’s Letters describe not only the noble visionary model for a new society free from institutional oppression, but also the very real destruction caused by the immorality of slavery, the bloody skirmishes between colonists and native residents, and the nightmarish turmoil of the Revolutionary War, which was not universally embraced by all the colonists and led to neighbors murdering neighbors. Crèvecoeur (whose name means “heartbreak” in French) watched his own American experience end in tragedy. At the time of the Revolutionary War he was unable to take sides, and while called away to France by his dying father, his farm was burned to the ground, his wife murdered and his children scattered. a farm. Nonetheless, Letters from an American Farmer continued to hold the imagination of European readers and was reprinted numerous times. The book has never attained the same popularity on these shores, however.
Picking up Joel Salatin’s newest literary endeavor, this reader felt the emotional resurrection of the founding agrarian ideals of Jefferson and Crèvecoeur in full, modern-day force. Everything I Want to Do is Illegal is an impassioned cri de coeur of a beleaguered member of that onceennobled population of American farmers. No longer a freeholder on his own land, restrained and fettered by regulatory agencies that seem to have his total eradication as their goal, the American small farmer is an endangered species. Although there are barely as many small farmers now as inmates in U.S. federal prisons, the fate of farmers is intimately tied to all of us who believe that we still have the right to feed ourselves and our families as we choose.
Salatin has chosen to illuminate the climate and geographical terrain of the “war zone” he inhabits as an entrepreneurial farmer by relating actual encounters with regulators that he and his family have endured while trying to make a living and providing their customers with the best food possible. The blood-boiling encounters are many, and the reader quickly becomes familiar with the Gordian Knot-style obstacles the regulatory agencies throw in Salatin’s path.
If anyone could be a match to their monstrously confounding, illogical rules and regulations, it is Salatin, and occasionally he was able to win the day through creative solutions that were grudgingly, though often only temporarily, accepted. However, as Salatin points out time and again, if the true aims of the endless regulations were actually clean meat, public safety, and a healthy food supply, Salatin’s Polyface Farms would long ago have been held up as a golden model for study and replication around the country. In fact, these legitimate aims are merely smokescreens for much more sinister motives. “If it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that no person can ingest a morsel of unsafe food, then only government food will be edible. And when that happens, freedom of choice is long gone, because the credentialed food will be what the fat cats who wine and dine politicians say that it is. In the name of offering only credentialed safe food, we will only be able to eat irradiated, genetically adulterated, inhumane, taste-enhanced, nutrient-deficient, emulsified, reconstituted pseudo-food from Archer Daniels Midland, ‘supermarket to the world.’”
Salatin is angry and with good reason. He and his family have struggled for years with inane regulations that were written with only industrial-scale food production technologies in mind, and that demanded small-scale operations either match or go out of business. This last option is, of course, exactly what thousands of small farmers have succumbed to over the years and still do. As Salatin says, “the systematic dissection of small, local food systems” is the obvious agenda of bureaucrats who are in bed with big ag.
Everything I Want to Do is Illegal contains chapters on food safety issues that will permanently turn the reader off any food from centralized, industrial sources. Salatin’s examination of the current state of oversight within this system proves it to be exquisitely vulnerable to bioterrorism with absolutely no effective government or industry precautions in force. The regulators are too busy overseeing small farmers out of business, while consumers’ food options dwindle.
Chapters on other farm-related activities invoke regulation fiascos in such areas as zoning, child labor, housing, insurance, and taxes, and are fertile topics for Salatin to develop his theme. A farm is not just a producer of raw materials, he repeats, but a vital, living organism that enriches and is enriched by the community it belongs to. “I would suggest that it takes a community to preserve a farm. To divorce a farm from its neighbors, its customers, the body of knowledge regarding ecological land stewardship and earthworm activities, is to destroy the farm. It cannot exist separated from the rich cultural soup that sustains it. . . . A farm includes the passion of the farmer’s heart, the interest of the farm’s customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air above the farm—it’s everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape.”
Polyface Farm has managed to prosper in spite of ongoing run-ins with institutional oppression, and over the years has blossomed into a veritable oasis of healthy food production, innovative land management, and out-reach education as the next generation of Salatins becomes established. Innovative thinking, study, and devising elegant solutions are clearly pleasurable pursuits for Salatin and his family, and one wonders where they and other farmers like them might be if they had been actually encouraged, supported and championed rather than brutally ambushed at every turn by autocratic government agencies. More important, where might our society be? Our communities would be dotted with numerous small farms, made prosperous by the close proximity of their customers. These customers would keep their communities robust by investing in their local food systems, and keep themselves and their families healthy by choosing food they can see being grown by farmers they know and trust. Further, Salatin points out, “without the expensive labeling, packaging and processing infrastructure requirements, this food could be sold at regular supermarket prices, and it would be infinitely better. Virtually all of the processed foods currently sold at the supermarket could be supplanted with community-based entrepreneurial fare. Does your heart ache for this? Mine does.”
As someone who “makes his living by thinking,” Salatin is an inspiration not only for other small farmers with entrepreneurial dreams, but for this country’s citizenry as well. Salatin’s stories remind us of our freedom and power as citizens to act without the hobbling shackles of fear, and to be suspicious of government laws enacted “for our security” that restrict our freedoms and impoverish our health. “On every side, our paternalistic culture is tightening the noose around those of us who just want to opt out of the system. And it is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrannical from free societies. . . . When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.”
Perhaps even worse than the viciousness of the regulators is the complacency of the populace, Salatin believes. The matters he airs in this book are emblematic of an autocratic government allied with the military- industrial complex; Salatin is merely describing the scene from his perspective as an entrepreneurial farmer. He clearly wants to involve all of us in finding another way: “. . . the goal of this book is to give Americans an insatiable appetite for something they don’t have. I want folks to leave these pages angry that they’ve been denied something righteous, something healthful. I want folks incensed that their government has sold our collective freedom birthright for a bowl of global corporate pottage.”
A bright development that emerged just after the publication of Salatin’s book has been The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (www. ftcldf.org). Formed in response to the need to protect small farmers from excessive government interference as well as preserve consumers’ rights to clean food purchased directly from the farm, the Fund has already provided legal counsel in several cases around the country. For anyone concerned about the corporate-owned, industrialized food supply, the spectre of GMOs, consumer rights to food choices, and other food, farming and health freedoms, joining the Fund is a first priority. The existence of the Fund is surely one strong means for the will of the people to unite to recover, as Salatin suggests, their “appetite for something they don’t have.”
“We should all dream for such a day,” Salatin urges. “Let the revolution come quickly.”
This article first appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2008.
Book Reviews - Thumbs Up Reviews
A Thumbs Up Book Review
Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front
By Joel Salatin Polyface
Publications, 2007
Reviewed by Katherine Czapp
“The instant I enter on my own land, the bright ideas of property, of exclusive right, of independence, exalt my mind. Precious soil, I say to myself, by what singular custom of law is it that thou wast made to constitute the riches of the freeholder? What should we American farmers be without the distinct possession of that soil? It feeds, it clothes us; from it we draw even a great exuberancy, our best meat, our richest drink; the very honey of our bees comes from this privileged spot. No wonder we should thus cherish its possession. . . it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as individuals of such a district. These images, I must confess, I always behold with pleasure and extend them as far as my imagination can reach; for this is what may be called the true and only philosophy of an American farmer.”
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a naturalized American citizen of French heritage wrote this rhapsodic hymn of the early American freeholder that became part of his Letters from an American Farmer, published in London in 1782. The book immediately became the first American literary success in Europe, and was translated into several languages; its author became a celebrated figure. Old Europe was keenly curious about the new American experiment in which equal opportunity and self-determination were the guiding lights of the new nation’s social structure, along with its utter rejection of the feudal tyranny of monarchist regimes.
“It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufactures employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. . . . We are a people of cultivators scattered over an immense terrain. . . united by the silken bands of a mild government, all respecting the laws without dreading their power because they are equitable. . . . We have no princes for whom we toil, starve and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world.”
Crèvecoeur spent several peaceful and prosperous years on his farm in New York, living the ideal shared by Thomas Jefferson and others who believed that a truly self-governing, democratic society must be composed largely of small, independent farmers. In fact, Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, also published in 1782, insisted that agriculture, not manufacturing, should form the economic basis of the new nation (although, prophetically for the nation, he was to change his mind after the War of 1812). Working directly with nature, “looking up to heaven and [down] to their own soil and industry,” instilled in these citizen-farmers the very qualities of independence, equity and justice for which the new republic ideally aimed.
These shining principles, of course, never quite became reality, and Crèvecoeur’s Letters describe not only the noble visionary model for a new society free from institutional oppression, but also the very real destruction caused by the immorality of slavery, the bloody skirmishes between colonists and native residents, and the nightmarish turmoil of the Revolutionary War, which was not universally embraced by all the colonists and led to neighbors murdering neighbors. Crèvecoeur (whose name means “heartbreak” in French) watched his own American experience end in tragedy. At the time of the Revolutionary War he was unable to take sides, and while called away to France by his dying father, his farm was burned to the ground, his wife murdered and his children scattered. a farm. Nonetheless, Letters from an American Farmer continued to hold the imagination of European readers and was reprinted numerous times. The book has never attained the same popularity on these shores, however.
Picking up Joel Salatin’s newest literary endeavor, this reader felt the emotional resurrection of the founding agrarian ideals of Jefferson and Crèvecoeur in full, modern-day force. Everything I Want to Do is Illegal is an impassioned cri de coeur of a beleaguered member of that onceennobled population of American farmers. No longer a freeholder on his own land, restrained and fettered by regulatory agencies that seem to have his total eradication as their goal, the American small farmer is an endangered species. Although there are barely as many small farmers now as inmates in U.S. federal prisons, the fate of farmers is intimately tied to all of us who believe that we still have the right to feed ourselves and our families as we choose.
Salatin has chosen to illuminate the climate and geographical terrain of the “war zone” he inhabits as an entrepreneurial farmer by relating actual encounters with regulators that he and his family have endured while trying to make a living and providing their customers with the best food possible. The blood-boiling encounters are many, and the reader quickly becomes familiar with the Gordian Knot-style obstacles the regulatory agencies throw in Salatin’s path.
If anyone could be a match to their monstrously confounding, illogical rules and regulations, it is Salatin, and occasionally he was able to win the day through creative solutions that were grudgingly, though often only temporarily, accepted. However, as Salatin points out time and again, if the true aims of the endless regulations were actually clean meat, public safety, and a healthy food supply, Salatin’s Polyface Farms would long ago have been held up as a golden model for study and replication around the country. In fact, these legitimate aims are merely smokescreens for much more sinister motives. “If it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that no person can ingest a morsel of unsafe food, then only government food will be edible. And when that happens, freedom of choice is long gone, because the credentialed food will be what the fat cats who wine and dine politicians say that it is. In the name of offering only credentialed safe food, we will only be able to eat irradiated, genetically adulterated, inhumane, taste-enhanced, nutrient-deficient, emulsified, reconstituted pseudo-food from Archer Daniels Midland, ‘supermarket to the world.’”
Salatin is angry and with good reason. He and his family have struggled for years with inane regulations that were written with only industrial-scale food production technologies in mind, and that demanded small-scale operations either match or go out of business. This last option is, of course, exactly what thousands of small farmers have succumbed to over the years and still do. As Salatin says, “the systematic dissection of small, local food systems” is the obvious agenda of bureaucrats who are in bed with big ag.
Everything I Want to Do is Illegal contains chapters on food safety issues that will permanently turn the reader off any food from centralized, industrial sources. Salatin’s examination of the current state of oversight within this system proves it to be exquisitely vulnerable to bioterrorism with absolutely no effective government or industry precautions in force. The regulators are too busy overseeing small farmers out of business, while consumers’ food options dwindle.
Chapters on other farm-related activities invoke regulation fiascos in such areas as zoning, child labor, housing, insurance, and taxes, and are fertile topics for Salatin to develop his theme. A farm is not just a producer of raw materials, he repeats, but a vital, living organism that enriches and is enriched by the community it belongs to. “I would suggest that it takes a community to preserve a farm. To divorce a farm from its neighbors, its customers, the body of knowledge regarding ecological land stewardship and earthworm activities, is to destroy the farm. It cannot exist separated from the rich cultural soup that sustains it. . . . A farm includes the passion of the farmer’s heart, the interest of the farm’s customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air above the farm—it’s everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape.”
Polyface Farm has managed to prosper in spite of ongoing run-ins with institutional oppression, and over the years has blossomed into a veritable oasis of healthy food production, innovative land management, and out-reach education as the next generation of Salatins becomes established. Innovative thinking, study, and devising elegant solutions are clearly pleasurable pursuits for Salatin and his family, and one wonders where they and other farmers like them might be if they had been actually encouraged, supported and championed rather than brutally ambushed at every turn by autocratic government agencies. More important, where might our society be? Our communities would be dotted with numerous small farms, made prosperous by the close proximity of their customers. These customers would keep their communities robust by investing in their local food systems, and keep themselves and their families healthy by choosing food they can see being grown by farmers they know and trust. Further, Salatin points out, “without the expensive labeling, packaging and processing infrastructure requirements, this food could be sold at regular supermarket prices, and it would be infinitely better. Virtually all of the processed foods currently sold at the supermarket could be supplanted with community-based entrepreneurial fare. Does your heart ache for this? Mine does.”
As someone who “makes his living by thinking,” Salatin is an inspiration not only for other small farmers with entrepreneurial dreams, but for this country’s citizenry as well. Salatin’s stories remind us of our freedom and power as citizens to act without the hobbling shackles of fear, and to be suspicious of government laws enacted “for our security” that restrict our freedoms and impoverish our health. “On every side, our paternalistic culture is tightening the noose around those of us who just want to opt out of the system. And it is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrannical from free societies. . . . When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol.”
Perhaps even worse than the viciousness of the regulators is the complacency of the populace, Salatin believes. The matters he airs in this book are emblematic of an autocratic government allied with the military- industrial complex; Salatin is merely describing the scene from his perspective as an entrepreneurial farmer. He clearly wants to involve all of us in finding another way: “. . . the goal of this book is to give Americans an insatiable appetite for something they don’t have. I want folks to leave these pages angry that they’ve been denied something righteous, something healthful. I want folks incensed that their government has sold our collective freedom birthright for a bowl of global corporate pottage.”
A bright development that emerged just after the publication of Salatin’s book has been The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (www. ftcldf.org). Formed in response to the need to protect small farmers from excessive government interference as well as preserve consumers’ rights to clean food purchased directly from the farm, the Fund has already provided legal counsel in several cases around the country. For anyone concerned about the corporate-owned, industrialized food supply, the spectre of GMOs, consumer rights to food choices, and other food, farming and health freedoms, joining the Fund is a first priority. The existence of the Fund is surely one strong means for the will of the people to unite to recover, as Salatin suggests, their “appetite for something they don’t have.”
“We should all dream for such a day,” Salatin urges. “Let the revolution come quickly.”
This article first appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2008.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)