“Virtually every human being on earth can now be considered physiologically and biochemically polluted by human-made chemicals.” — Toxicologist James Siow, MD, PhD, of the Australian National Institute of Integrative Medicine. We’re all in toxic overload, and this is having a disastrous effect on our health! The body has wonderful detoxification systems, but they’re being overwhelmed by the unprecedented number of man-made chemicals they’re forced to deal with.  According to toxicologist James Siow , with our current exposure to toxins, the average individual can process and excrete only about 40-60% of the toxins they’re exposed to. The remainder bio-accumulates in tissues and organs, doing more and more damage over time. According to a 2016 report commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO ), about one quarter of the global disease burden and more than one third of the burden among children is due to modifiable environmental factors.…

Do you seem to catch every cold or flu going around? Do you have an ongoing infection, like the yeast infection candida, that you can’t get rid of?  Or do you have the opposite problem—an overactive immune system leading to allergies or to an autoimmune disease? Do you have, or have you had cancer?  These are all indications that your immune system isn’t protecting you as it should, and it’s likely that a primary reason for that is that you don’t have enough glutathione. Glutathione is a critical protein that your body produces. It can also be obtained from food and supplements.  Glutathione has been called “the mother antioxidant” because our antioxidant system can’t function without it. Neither can our detoxification system. And neither can our immune system. Glutathione has the following six essential roles in immune function: Glutathione patrols the bloodstream directly killing many pathogens before they can begin…

Want to age slower and live longer? Back in 1976, Dr. Benjamin S. Frank, a medical doctor and PhD molecular biologist, published a best-selling book, Dr. Frank’s No-Aging Diet.  This book proposed a revolutionary way of looking at aging. Dr. Frank was a miracle worker.  It was reported that he could take anyone over the age of fifty and, in 3-4 weeks, have them looking 10-15 years younger, with much more energy, endurance, and aerobic capacity.  Over twenty years of meticulous research and record-keeping, Dr. Frank documented achieving many health building and rejuvenating effects in his patients, including significant increases in energy and oxygenation, enhanced immunity and cognitive performance, improved capacity to tolerate low and high temperatures, smoother skin and thicker hair. Although his intent was to build general health rather than to treat specific diseases, his approach improved acne, ALS, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, emphysema, glaucoma and po…

Millions of Americans take fish oil supplements for their numerous benefits, including cardiovascular health benefits, improved mental clarity, increased energy, healthier circulation, and much more. Why does fish oil work so many miracles?  Because Omega-3 deficiency is widespread; perhaps as many as 90% of our population is deficient.  And because Omega-3s have important roles in our bodies. Deficiency and toxicity are the two causes of disease, and if we’re deficient in Omega-3s, it’s impossible to be healthy. Omega-3s are essential for building healthy cell membranes.  If they’re not available when needed, the body uses other fats, like saturated fat and transfat, to make these membranes.  This means our cell membranes will be improperly constructed; they won’t let in nutrients they’re supposed to admit, or release metabolic wastes that are polluting the insides of our cells. Omega-3s are also anti-inflammatory, and it’s critical to have a good rat…

How much thought do you give to dietary fiber? If you’re like most of us, it’s not a priority—but it should be! Dietary fiber is one of the most important determinants of your health! Almost everyone today does not get enough fiber in their diet. Our lack of fiber awareness has created a health crisis. Lack of fiber is a major contributor to our epidemic of chronic disease and can be a significant factor in causing diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity, depression and other mental illness, allergies, autoimmune syndromes, and infections.   Why is fiber so important? Dietary fiber, plant material that can’t be digested, is essential to our health because it nourishes the healthy flora in our guts known as the microbiome and helps to maintain the health of our gut tissue. Your health is completely dependent on the health of your gut flora. Healthy flora helps to digest our food and enhance the absorption of nutrients. They produce certain essential vitam…

As we age, our blood tends to become thicker, stickier and more viscous. When your blood is thick and flows more slowly, oxygen and other nutrients aren’t delivered as efficiently. But worse, viscous blood forms deadly clots more readily and has an abrasive quality that damages blood vessel linings, setting the stage for inflammation, plaque formation and eventual atherosclerosis. It also contributes to high blood pressure and is implicated in age-related cognitive decline and dementias like Alzheimer’s disease.  So keeping the blood thin (as in “blood thinners”) is a good idea, and to this end, doctors often recommend aspirin for its blood-thinning abilities. But aspirin has a big downside: by slowing tissue repair it increases the risk of internal bleeding—usually gastrointestinal bleeding, but also the kind of retinal bleeding or leaking that causes macular degeneration. Even the supposedly safer low doses have been found over time to do the same kind of se…

PFAS (per- and profluoroalkyls) are a group of toxic man-made chemical compounds used in a variety of non-stick, water-repellent, and grease and stain-resistant applications. Detrimental to just about every body organ, they’ve been associated with a host of diseases including weakened immune function, cancer, and developmental problems in children.Unfortunately, PFOA, the best known of the PFAS, is found in just about all Americans, and has a half-life in humans of about four years. After a lot of bad press, PFOA and its close cousin, PFOS, were banned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), so their levels in our bodies are going down. But they’re being rapidly replaced by new PFAS that, according to environmental advocacy organization, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), are just as bad. No level of PFAS is desirable in the human body. And since there doesn’t seem to be any way to facilitate their removal (even sweating in an infrared sauna didn’t help to…

Would you like to be smarter? Of course, you would! Who wouldn’t want to be able to bring laser-like attention to the task at hand, assess all the elements in a situation quickly, analyze how they interrelate, and remain wholeheartedly engaged and absorbed until any problem is solved creatively and effectively?Well, vitamin C supplementation can help with that, especially if you’re at all deficient — and most of us are!Recently, Korean scientists assembled a group of 241 healthy, young (ages 20-39) adults to see if their serum vitamin C levels correlated with their “mental vitality.” Indeed, it did. So the researchers went a step further. About half of these young Korean men and women had “inadequate” levels of the vitamin, which the researchers defined as being less than 0.88 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). Fifty of these vitamin C-insufficient subjects were invited to participate in a four-week experiment. Half of them took 500 mg of vitamin C twice a day, fo…

Good habits are essential in being able to live the lives we desire. Still, we tend to approach willpower not as something we can build up and strengthen but, instead, as an innate characteristic that we either have or don't. We further perceive bad habits as reflective of our lack of willpower. But, as many know, it's not so easy to break bad habits or to start new ones, like regular exercise or a daily meditation practice. Too often, attempts to change habits fail. Repeated failures can create the unintended pattern of failing, which leads to losing hope and believing we're incapable of change. So, the first consideration in changing habits is to establish the habit of success! How can you get started? Treat Willpower Like a Muscle The will is like a muscle that needs training to be strengthened. Imagine if you began weightlifting by trying to press 200 pounds! You would certainly fail. But most people set self-improvement goals that are similarly much too…

"What you repeatedly do (i.e. what you spend time thinking about and doing each day) ultimately forms the person you are, the things you believe and the personality that you portray." - James Clear, author of the New York Times bestselling book Atomic Habits You find yourself falling into certain patterns day in and day out. These are your habits, whether you realize them or not. Some support you toward your goals, while others, it seems, get you bogged down in less-beneficial behaviors. Our habits define us, but what exactly are habits? Defining "Habit" A habit is formed when we perform a certain behavior repeatedly over time because it rewards us in some way. This continual repetition literally etches neural pathways in our brains, so that eventually we respond to a given trigger automatically and mostly unconsciously with that behavior. For example, triggered by a feeling of thirst, we seek out water or some other beverage to drink. Triggered by entering a dark room, we swi…

Life tends to feel like you're always on the go: You're reaching for a new goal at work, attempting to squeeze in more time for your family or hobbies, and then you address your health by going to the gym or another form of physical activity. Even if you do it all, the hectic pace catches up to you, and you notice how exhausted you feel over time. But why should it be either-or? Rather than pull back or surge forward while ignoring your health, understand how to effectively balance rest and activity. This year, Beyond Health is focusing on maximizing energy in order to do all the wonderful and amazing things you want to do with your life. But to maximize energy, you first need to balance activity with deep rest and relaxation, to give your body a chance to settle and become quieter, and to heal and regenerate.Understanding Balance in the BodyIn Chinese medicine, there are two principles that govern all life, yang and yin. Yang is dynamic, active, hard, brilliant, quick, courageous and…

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurological condition. Although it may start out with something as simple as a tremor in a single finger, it can progress over the years to complete disability. Its hallmark is the dying off of brain cells that make the neurotransmitter dopamine. Without sufficient dopamine, movement becomes increasingly difficult and finally almost impossible. PD's non-motor symptoms include anxiety, depression, fatigue, insomnia and other sleep disorders, hallucinations, cognitive impairment and dementia. Although dopamine replacement and enhancement drugs can control motor symptoms for a while, they don't reverse or stop the underlying disease process. When these medications lose their effectiveness, a surgery may be done to control symptoms. But again, because the surgery doesn't address the underlying disease process, it too becomes less effective with time.However, a novel therapy addresses both symptoms and the disease process. Using Thiamine (…

Neurodegenerative disease occurs when nerve cells in the brain or nervous system lose function over time and ultimately die. Alzheimer's disease, which affects as many as 6.2 million Americans, is the most common neurodegenerative disease, but there are hundreds of others, including other dementias, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, Huntington's disease and Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS). All have potential to affect an individual's quality of life in varying degrees - be it changes in personality, performing daily tasks, maintaining employment or remembering current and past information. Development of one of these conditions often requires significant modifications, medical treatment and, long term, extensive care from family members or professionals. Although conventional medical treatments help relieve some of the physical and mental symptoms associated with neurodegenerative diseases, there is currently no way to slow disease progression and no known cures.Light Therapy Interve…

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disease in which brain cells that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine gradually die off. The result is an increasing loss of control of motor functions and other non-motor symptoms. Although it doesn't usually show up until after the age of 60, PD can afflict younger people, too. A case in point is the popular actor Michael J. Fox, who noticed the first signs of PD when he was only 30 years old.What Is Parkinson's Disease?PD is a progressive neurological condition often starting with tremors. With time, the body can experience a combination of uncontrollable shaking, stiffness and slower movement and difficulty with balance and coordination. Speech, meanwhile, may start to sound slurred or softer than usual. These physical developments may be accompanied by changes in mood, memory, sleep and energy. These symptoms occur due to decreased amounts of neurons transmitting dopamine to your brain and tend to first be noticed after the…

Beyond Health’s approach to weight loss, presented in Raymond Francis’ Never Be Fat Again, (NBFA) is based on the theory of one disease and two causes. We say there is really only one disease—malfunctioning body cells, and two reasons why cells malfunction—they are deficient in needed nutrients and/or they are being poisoned by toxins. Overweight is a type of disease, and as better health is achieved, the body will naturally lose excess weight.Intuitive eating (IE) is an anti-diet approach to weight loss which seeks to help people regain a lost or weakened ability to “hear” and respond to body cues relating to hunger and satiation. Regaining this ability, it is hoped, will lead to losing excess weight. Both IE and NBFA agree that diets don’t work. Thought they can lead to short-term weight loss, most of this weight is regained over time. They also agree that diets are usually harmful and enforce the bad habit of overriding internal body cues. Following the strategies of IE that we…

Nothing is more important in creating optimal health than our habits. We all know that we should be exercising regularly, eating a sensible diet, getting a good amount of sleep, minimizing stress and ideally establishing some kind of stress-reduction practice. It’s the actual doing that’s the problem. Too many lofty goals fizzle out, leaving feelings of shame and incompetence in their wake.One secret to successfully adopting and integrating a good health habit into your life is to put the lofty goal(s) aside for the moment and focus on taking small, but consistent steps in the right direction.See this one-minute TED talk by sociologist Christine Carter, who successfully eased regular running into her life by starting out small. And I mean small. Her initial commitment was one minute a day! But she did it consistently, and gradually it turned into more and more minutes. Consistency was the key. Because every time she put on her running shoes in the morning she etched the new habit…

Use it or lose it. No where is this more true than with our joints. Joint stiffness, joint pain, and a loss of range of motion has less to do with age than it has to do with lack of use.Our lives often lead us to a lot of sitting, which means our joints are not moving. How often do we allow our ankles, our knees, our hips to go through a full range of motion? Probably not often enough.When we have joint stiffness, joint aches, and joint pain it takes much more effort to do the simplest of activities, discouraging us from doing the very thing that will make us feel better.How do we break this cycle and make our joints be the levers that spring us into the joys of a more active life? Here are 8 simple tips to reduce joint pain and joint stiffness and fuel a more active life with less pain and more excitement. With each of these suggestions, make little improvements at a time. Gradual improvements allow our muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones to strengthen as they t…

A primary concern that prompted Beyond Health's mission to improve the health of the American people was that he feared our epidemic of chronic disease would bankrupt our economy.Nowhere is this concern more justified than in the case of Alzheimer’s disease. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, in 2021, 6 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, one out of every three seniors dies with the disease or another dementia, and dementias will cost the nation $355 billion, including $239 billion in Medicare and Medicaid payments combined. Without a major scientific breakthrough, by 2050 the Association projects there will be 13 million Alzheimer's patients, costing more than $1.1 trillion (in 2021 dollars) annually.Yet, as we have described previously, Dr. Dale E. Bredesen at UCLA, who was influenced by Raymond and his two causes-six pathways theory of disease, has shown that Alzheimer’s is preventable and reversible if treated early enough and addressing multiple factors that may be involved…