Question: Why are synthetic vitamins not good for you?  G. D. – San Antonio, TX  Answer: There is nothing wrong with a synthetic vitamin so long as the synthesis produces a molecule that is identical to the molecule that the body needs and wants. The problem with most synthetic vitamins is that the synthesis process produces molecules that are similar to but not exactly what the body needs and wants. Often, the only difference is in the shape of the molecule, but in biology, the shape is critical because the exact shape is what allows the molecule to react with enzymes. Here is an example: synthetic beta carotene is 100 percent trans-beta-carotene.  Natural beta-carotene is a mixture containing mostly cis-beta-carotene. Experiments show that naturally derived beta-carotene is four times more effective as an antioxidant than synthetic beta-carotene, and synthetic beta-carotene has been shown to increase cancer in smokers. In one experiment, synthetic beta-carotene was found to be…

Question: I have been experiencing a lot of anxiety attacks.  Some of them are just overwhelming with heart palpitations and chest pain that can last for hours afterwards.  My doctor’s answer is antidepressant drugs.  I know that is not addressing the causes, only treating the symptoms.  Do you have any suggestions?  Anonymous – Hillsboro Beach, FL Answer: You need to work with someone who can help you with this, as it can be quite complicated.  I suggest a medical practitioner who specializes in alternative approaches to these problems. There are many safe approaches to reducing anxiety.  There is no need to resort to prescription drugs, which are certain to cause you a host of new problems due to their toxicity.  As with any health problem, you most likely would not be experiencing it if you were eating a healthy diet.  Ninety cents of the American food dollar is spent on processed foods that are toxic garbage.  If you eat garbage, your body won’t work right.  Garbage is som…

Question: Two years ago we moved into a new apartment. Since then, I have been suffering from depression.  I know from your articles that depression is caused by nutritional deficiencies, but I am doing everything you suggest in your articles and taking your supplements, and I am still sick.  There is a lot of mold growing in our bathroom and kitchen, and I was wondering if this could be having an effect.  A.J. – Houston, TX Answer:   Your suspicions may be correct.  In fact, there was a study published in the American Journal of Public Health finding that people who live in moldy environments are more likely to suffer from depression.  You could have a cerebral allergy to molds or the toxins from the molds could be having an effect on your brain. Whatever the reason for your depression, living in a moldy environment is not healthy.  I would strongly advise you to move to another apartment.  This will benefit your overall health and may well cure your depression.  Always check…

Question: A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association determined that going on a diet high in fruits and vegetables did not prevent the return of breast cancer in a 7 year experiment with 3000 women.  Comments? J.W. – San Francisco, CA Answer: This study is a perfect example of how to waste money ($35 million) and confuse the public by doing inane studies.  In short, given the conditions of the study, I could have easily predicted the results without spending the money, but then the clueless researches might go hungry. The researches were mystified by the results because the people in the study did not lose weight.  This is an important clue.  Anyone on a healthy plant-food diet with plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables will lose weight. These people did not lose weight because they were allowed to eat the unhealthy foods that drive cancer and overweight – sugar, white flour, processed oils and dairy/excess animal protein.  The women were allowed to eat meat an…

Question: What do you recommend we do to get the high quality foods we need? H. H. — Georgetown, Ontario Answer: When I lived in California, fresh organic foods were available year round and made it life a lot easier for the health conscious.  However, there are things you can do to improve upon the usual supermarket fare. As much as possible, grow your own food.  It’s amazing how much food you can get from a garden that is just 30 square feet.  In the winter, grow sprouts in your kitchen.  Go online and get information on sprouting products and instructions on how to do it.  A few sprouting jars will supply you with fresh, nutritious and inexpensive food all winter long.  When available, buy locally grown foods, especially at farmer’s markets.  Talk to the farmers and ask about pesticide and herbicide use.  Organic farms are popping up all over the place.  Make sure the product you select looks healthy, and never buy or consume anything that is even the slightest bit moldy. …

Question: I have been trying to lose weight.  I think I am doing all the right things, but I’m not having much success.  Do you have any suggestions? P. O. – Los Altos, CA Answer:   On the bottom line, losing weight is about reducing calories and getting regular exercise.  However, even when reducing calories, the kinds of calories you eat make a difference.  I recall reading in a technical journal of obese patients who had trouble losing weight and who were given one rule to live by – do not eat white flour.  All of these subjects experience dramatic reductions in weight within three months. Refined grains and sugars somehow seem to do more than just overload us with empty calories.  They also appear to alter our biochemistry in a way that leads to obesity.  Refined carbohydrates increase saturate fat and cholesterol levels while decreasing vitamin, mineral, fiber, and glutathione levels among others. To lose weight, avoid all wheat, refined sugar and dairy products.  Incr…

Question: I am trying to get my husband to take your supplements.  He says vitamins make expensive urine and that he doesn’t need them.  What can I say to him to wake him up? I. T. – Internet Answer:   Your husband is right.  There is no reason to take supplements – providing.  Providing he is eating food grown in mineral-rich soils that is fresh, organically grown, locally grown and not transported over long distances or stored for months before being consumed.  In addition, he’s working outdoors, breathing unpolluted air, drinking unpolluted water, free of exposure to other environmental toxins, exercising daily, getting nine hours of sleep and living a stress-free life.  If he does all that, who needs supplements?  I do as much of that as I can and I still take supplements.  You might ask him how he thinks he’s doing regarding this list.…

Question: What do they mean when they say rebounding is good for the lymph system? D. E. – Louisville, KY Answer:   Rebounding helps to drain the lymph system.  One thing that gets little attention from modern medicine, unless something goes wrong with it, is the lymphatic system.  Yet this system is critical to health and we have to care for it.  More than just the lymph vessels and nodes, the lymph system also includes the tonsils and adenoids as well as the spleen, appendix and thymus gland.  Lymph vessels carry all kinds of toxins and wastes from cells and tissues.  Encouraging this process is essential for health and critical for restoring health. If the circulatory system is like the water system coming into your house, the lymphatic system is like the drainage system leaving your house.  What would happen to your house if all the drains plugged up?  Pretty messy!  The same thing happens in your body, and today’s sedentary lifestyle does not encourage lymphatic drainage.…

Question: Your staff recommended that I take Beyond Health Dietary Fiber for my high blood pressure.  I am wondering what this has to do with blood pressure. C. D. — Lauderhill, FL Answer:  Beyond Health Dietary Fiber is a quality fiber supplement, and adequate dietary fiber can help to keep your blood pressure under control.  A study in the March 2005 Journal of Hypertension found that a high-fiber diet was associated with a significant reduction in blood pressure levels among people with hypertension.  This is important to know because about 50 million Americans and one billion people worldwide have high blood pressure, for which the usual treatment is blood pressure lowering medications. Unfortunately, prescription drugs are toxic, and there are far better ways to deal with this problem.  Decreased sodium intake, increased potassium intake, increased physical activity and supplementation with magnesium and CoQ10 are effective choices.  This new data adds fiber to the list. …

Question: When I hear you speak, you make health sound so simple.  I wish it were that simple. E. S. – Novato, CA Answer:   There is nothing simple about human health.  It is extremely complex.  However, no one can deal with that level of complexity.  That’s why it is necessary to reduce the complexity to some simple concepts that anyone can understand and put to work in their life. After almost three decades of study, I have come to the conclusion that there are few “diseases” that cannot be effectively addressed by a change in diet and lifestyle.  The average American eats a diet that cannot and does not sustain healthy human life.  Even a small improvement in such a diet can have a big impact on health. Biologically speaking, there is a series of chemical reactions that create energy in the body.  These reactions are called the “Krebs Cycle.”  Everyone in our complex society knows that, without energy, nothing works.  The same is true for our bodies.  The production of e…

Question: What is the DASH diet? T. O. – Davie, FL Answer:   DASH stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension and it is recommended to lower blood pressure.  The DASH diet was developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.  It is an eating style that resembles the diets consumed by people living around the Mediterranean that is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean poultry, nuts and beans, including reduced salt intake.  Best of all, it is effective in lowering high blood pressure, which has become a massive public health problem. A recent study in Circulation:  Journal of the American Heart Association looked at rural and urban populations in China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  It sheds some light on why this diet works.  An amino acid, glutamic acid, commonly found in vegetable protein is associated with lower blood pressure.  People who eat more plant foods have a higher intake of glutamic acid. Beyond Health recommends the DAS…

Question:   I have recently had surgery and my doctor has prescribed Coumadin.  Is there a healthy alternative?  T. X. – San Jose, CA Answer:   There is always a safer alternative to a prescription drug.  Drugs are toxic and they damage the body, causing more disease.  Coumadin interferes with vitamin K metabolism, which interferes with calcium metabolism.  This shifts the way the body handles calcium, causing it to remove calcium from bones and store it in soft tissues including heart valves.  Calcified heart valves, hardened arteries, weak bones, and painful joints are not what you want, but are what you get by taking Coumadin. Tell your doctor that you don’t want to use Coumadin, and you want them to help you do this safely.  You have to work with your doctor; don’t do it on your own.  Gradually, get on Beyond Health’s Anti-Thrombic Kit.  This consists of choline citrate, curcumin, fish oil, flax seed oil, garlic extract, ginkgo biloba and magnesium.  This add-on kit taken…

Question: I suffer from arrhythmia and my doctor wants to put me on drugs.  Is there a natural way to deal with this problem? D. J. – San Francisco, CA Answer:   Arrhythmia is an irregularity in the force or the rhythm of the heartbeat.  In truth, normal heart rhythms are irregular.  When irregularity goes outside of normal limits, and you start to experience irregular beats, flip-flops in your chest, pounding, racing, and skipped beats, this can be a sign of serious disease. The heart’s rhythm is controlled by an electrical impulse that is generated from a clump of tissue on the right atrium, called the sinoatrial node, often referred to as the heart’s natural pacemaker.  When you have arrhythmia, something has gone wrong with this electrical system.  Fortunately, in most cases this is easy to fix, but not with drugs.  Drugs are virtually never the solution to health problems, and anti-arrhythmia drugs carry a risk of serious side effects, including damage to the liver, lungs…

. . . easy ways to get more garlic into your diet Garlic inspires much love, much hate in social circles everywhere. Not unlike its vegetable cousin, the onion, garlic is notoriously tricky to peel, rubs off on fingers, lingers in your breath and stands out in every dish it is tossed in. Is its flavor worth it? Garlic lovers enthusiastically say, “Yes!” To them, it tastes great, is a healthier and tastier alternative to salt, and enhances just about any savory dish. Beyond flavor, however, garlic packs one heck of a health benefit punch: according to several studies, it lowers blood pressure and, when taken in large amounts, thins the blood. Because of this, it serves as an important dietary ally to reducing high blood pressure (HBP or hypertension). The Dangers of HBP If the force of blood flow in your cardiovascular system is too high, over time, the tissue that makes up the walls of arteries gets stretched beyond its healthy limit and gets injured. This can ultimately pr…

. . . lowers systolic blood pressure by as much as 17 mm Hg Dr. Thomas Frieden, Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has called uncontrolled high blood pressure “public enemy #2” when it comes to threats to our nation’s health. A major risk factor for heart attack and stroke, and even kidney disease, high blood pressure affects one-third of our population (two-thirds of those over the age of 65), costs our economy an estimated $131 billion in health care costs annually, and contributes to more than 1,000 deaths each and every day. Medications don’t necessarily control high blood pressure, and they produce side effects that make many loathe to take them. Dizziness, nausea, arrhythmias, sexual problems and many other unpleasant and even dangerous symptoms have plagued those who dutifully take these drugs. Yet in a recent study, taking just two capsules of Kyolic garlic daily for four months reduced systolic blood pressure (SBP --the top number) fr…

. . . an apple a day keeps the cardiologist away It turns out that eating an apple daily really is a valuable health practice! A recent study at Ohio State University found that it reduced LDL oxidation by 40% in just four weeks! Why is this important? Well, as you may have read in this month’s Beyond Health EZine, cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease . . . unless it’s oxidized. The first step in developing atherosclerosis is the oxidation of low-density-lipoprotein (LDL cholesterol). Although we are a nation obsessed with lowering our cholesterol numbers, half of all heart attacks occur in people with normal cholesterol levels, and there are as many heart attacks in people with cholesterol over 300 as there are under 200. What we should become obsessed with is reducing oxidation and inflammation . . . in managing oxidative stress by getting plenty of antioxidant nutrients in fresh fruits and vegetables and in supplements, and by adopting an anti-inflammatory lifestyle.…

. . . green tea is one of many sources of antioxidants  A study recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition followed almost 14,000 Japanese men and women aged 65 and older for three years and found that the more green tea they drank, the less disability they incurred. Those drinking 1-2 cups a day had a 10% lower risk of disability than those who drank less than a cup a day. Those who drank 3-4 cups a day had a 25% reduced risk, and those who drank 5 cups or more a day had a 33% reduced risk. Since previous studies had found green tea consumption associated with reduced risk of stroke, dementia, fracture and depression, all of which are associated with higher risk for disability, these results weren’t surprising. The primary reason green tea is so beneficial to health is that it contains high levels of antioxidant polyphenols. Our green tea contains 200 mg of these antioxidant polyphenols per cup compared with most green tea, which averages just 60 mg per cu…

 ...more than 3/4 of the population suffers from hidden inflammationMost people don't know or care about inflammation. Should you? YES! Unless you're in a fortunate minority, you're suffering from chronic inflammation right now, and it's aging you and undermining your health.There's a big difference between acute inflammation -- the pain, redness and swelling that follow an injury -- and chronic inflammation that smolders outside of your awareness, causing internal damage day in and day out.  Chronic inflammation causes or contributes to all the chronic diseases -- allergies, Alzheimer's, arthritis, asthma, autoimmune diseases, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, overweight, skin rashes -- you name it. And even in the absence of overt disease, chronic inflammation generates a steady stream of free radicals, disturbing your cell chemistry and keeping you feeling sub-par.What causes inflammation? In large part our diets, which lack nutrients that help to prevent and cont…