. . . mounting evidence against childhood vaccines August is National Immunization Awareness Month. As good citizens, we at Beyond Health are eager to do our part by increasing public awareness . . . that while proof for the effectiveness of immunizations is sorely lacking, the evidence is strong that they can do substantial harm! Children in the US get more vaccinations before the age of one year than in any other country in the world. We also head the list among developed countries in infant mortality! Coincidence? We don't think so. A 2011 study published in Human & Experimental Toxicology compared 34 developed countries and found a direct correlation between number of vaccinations and infant mortality: those with the most vaccinations had the most infant deaths, the US heading the list. This is one more piece of evidence in a mounting pile indicating that vaccines aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and may be especially harmful to children. According to statistics…

by Raymond Francis The food industry has done a very good job of making it extremely easy, and not that expensive, to grab calorie-dense food on the run. This is a great help to Americans who are working more hours than ever to make ends meet, however there’s one big problem: the side effects. Fast foods and processed foods are killing us! Devoid of nutrition and loaded with toxins, these foods supply nutrient deficiency and toxicity, the two causes for all disease. So on the way to premature graves, we’re likely to spend every penny we’ve saved buying cheap food on medical expenses for an array of chronic and often disabling illnesses like heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and cancer. Most people know they “should be eating better,” but the transition from fast food to healthy eating can seem pretty formidable. Here are a few ideas that can help make healthy eating a little easier. The New Fast Food: Green Drinks! Finding it hard to get the recommended 10-12 servings of…

. . . sunlight may be the best nutrient yet Nothing boosts immunity like Vitamin D, and summer is the season to get your vitamin D absolutely free! Just go out in the sun and expose as much of your skin as modesty allows to UVB rays from the sun. Your body will magically transform them into usable vitamin D -- a gift from Mother Nature! But the benefits of sunlight don’t stop there. There are many good reasons why humans have been sun-worshippers since the dawn of time. Sunlight increases helpful hormones and neurotransmitters like cortisol, serotonin, GABA and dopamine. These promote energy, happiness (serotonin and dopamine are the neurotransmitters that antidepressants boost to improve mood), and weight loss. In his book The Healing Sun, Richard Hobday, PhD, lists the following additional benefits of sunlight: it lowers cholesterol, treats multiple sclerosis and osteoporosis, prevents and treats cancer, lowers blood pressure, kills chronic viral infections in the blood, inc…

. . . Fluoridation "an outdated, unscientific, failed public health blunder" Fluoridation is one of the greatest frauds of the 20th century. More toxic than lead, and only slightly less toxic than arsenic, fluoride is an extremely dangerous toxin that lowers IQ and increases your risk of getting osteoporosis and thyroid, kidney, cardiovascular and many other diseases, including cancer. Despite scores of studies showing that fluoride ingestion is ineffective at reducing tooth decay and is actually harmful to teeth, fluoride has been added to US public water for more than sixty years. Dr. Paul Connett, Executive Director of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), calls fluoridation, “an outdated, unscientific, failed public health blunder.” The US always seems to lag behind other developed countries when it comes to protecting its public from environmental toxins like fluoride. According to the FAN, over half of the people in the world drinking fluoridated water live in the US. Japan an…

. . .  win a Beyond Health Back-to-School Kit! Sending your child to school with a healthy lunch that will please a child’s finicky palate, won’t subject them to peer ridicule, and won’t take hours in the kitchen to make – is no mean feat.  So we’re out to help stumped parents everywhere by collecting successful recipes from our clever readers. Send to [email protected] your child-tested and approved healthy recipe. You’ll be helping other parents, and we’ll reward the top three winners with these prizes: First Prize: A Beyond Health Back-to-School Kit Second Prize: A bottle of Beyond Health Children’s Multivitamin Third Prize: A Beyond Health Water Bottle All recipes should be in by Wednesday, September 26th. The winner will be announced in the Newsclips on Saturday, September 28th. For guidance in selecting a recipe to send, at Beyond Health, we consider a healthy diet to be plant-based and free from the foods that are downright hazardous to your health. We c…

. . .  it’s probably been made even more toxic with aspartame Our poor children are faced with unhealthy food choices everywhere they look. One place parents should be able to count on to provide healthy food for their kids is their school. But no such luck! Milk is already a toxic soup (see my article on Milk) that no one should be drinking, but would you believe that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows the $1 billion a year school lunch program to purchase milk flavored with chemical sweeteners, especially aspartame? Aspartame (NutraSweet® and Equal are two trade names for this toxic sweetener) is the last thing you want to give a child. It’s an excitotoxin that can damage and even destroy nerve and brain cells. Yet 40% of our children regularly ingest aspartame. Can you say Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? Aspartame, which has also been linked with cancer, impairs absorption of the amino acid tryptophan. Tryptophan in turn is used to make serotonin,…

. . . there are problems with antibacterials, and regular soap protects you just as well Frequent hand washing is one good way for you and your kids to prevent winter colds and flu, but antibacterial soaps do nothing more than regular soaps to protect you, while antibacterial chemicals can raise havoc both in the human body and in our environment. According to a 2008 Environmental Working Group (EWG) report, both the American Medical Association and a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee, along with “dozens of academic researchers” concluded that antimicrobial soaps don’t work any better than plain soap and water at preventing the spread of infections. But while antibacterials, the most common and most studied being triclosan, don’t offer any additional protection, they do provide additional risk. Triclosan is known to be toxic to bacteria, algae and fish. I think you can be virtually certain it is also toxic to humans. Animal studies suggest that triclosan is…

…forget milk and cookies, crackers and juice boxes…there are much healthier choices. Most parents consider convenience a smart tool for running the household. And it’s never been truer than when serving snacks to kids...especially during the school day. Snacks play a big role in providing proper nutrition…building life-long healthy eating habits…and helping prevent costly, often disabling diseases. Yet, most convenience foods are processed foods that lack adequate nutrition, and worse, contain harmful chemical additives. What about food items other kids bring in? Consider this… You can’t control what other parents feed their kids. Or what treats they send to school to share. But you can and should make sure you provide your child healthy snacks. Whether morning or afternoon snack time…birthday celebrations…or field trips, school time is your opportunity to set the example on what a healthy snack food is…and isn’t. Healthy Snacks to Send Choosing healthy snacks to send…

. . . guidelines focus on managing a chronic problem Last March the American College of Gastroenterology released its updated guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), more commonly known as heartburn. Nowhere in this lengthy report which analyzed 51 years of medical research on GERD was there any mention of either prevention or cure. Nor did it allude to what Beyond Health believes is the primary cause of GERD: inadequate or faulty digestion.  Although in some cases, it may also be caused by mechanical problems such as hiatal hernias. Apart from quite a few recommendations involving the use of drugs (H2 blockers, antacids and proton pump inhibitors), the report’s primary treatment recommendations were weight loss, elevating the head of your bed, and avoiding high-fat meals 2-3 hours prior to bedtime. To assess these recommendations as well as the role played by digestion, let’s first review what GERD is and what causes it. There is…

…helping kids handle stress may be your biggest challenge this school year A 2009 APA Stress in America survey showed nearly half of all students stress about doing well in school. And it’s only gotten worse. In fact, we see mounting evidence that school-aged kids today are drowning under the stress of peer relationships…academic overload…and pressure to perform. While it may be impossible to keep your kids worry-free, use the following proven tips to ease kids through the stress of another school year. Keep a consistent day-to-day routine—Routine helps kids feel safe and relaxed. Thus, they’ll be better equipped to focus on one task at a time…steer clear of overwhelm…and perform to expectations. Researchers say kids eventually hard-wire this into their behavior. So it’s important parents start routines early, and keep kids consistent with them. Get plenty of sleep—Experts insist kids 5-12 years old should get up to 10 hours of restful sleep for proper physical and…

By Raymond Francis What does being happy have to do with staying youthful as you age? Everything! Happiness creates health, and when you’re healthy, you can be youthful at any age. I just finished my new book, Never Feel Old Again. In it, I propose that successful aging – staying strong and energetic, with all faculties intact, for a lifetime – requires the same holistic approach to living I’ve been recommending for decades to achieve optimal health. This approach involves maximizing nutrition and minimizing toxicity along 6 different pathways: nutrition, toxin, mental, physical, genetic, and medical. All the pathways are important, and none can be excluded if you want to age with vitality. For example, it doesn’t matter how much you exercise (physical pathway), if you eat a terrible diet (nutrition pathway), you’re going to create disease and what I call premature or accelerated aging. But perhaps the most important pathway, although usually given the least credibility and…

. . . and how Vitamin C is essential in maintaining gut flora balance When we think of bacteria, we usually think of the bad ones that cause disease, or sometimes death. Bad bacteria—like botulinum, E. coli, salmonella, and streptococci—disrupt our body’s normal functioning when they injure cells and tissues, compromise its immune system, and deplete vital nutrients. But most bacteria in our body are harmless, and actually essential to our survival. Like the bacteria—along with other microorganisms—that make up our intestinal microflora, or gut flora. These helpful bacteria in our digestive tract play a key role in our overall health by synthesizing nutrients from our diet and making them available to cells, protecting against foreign invaders, preventing inflammation, directing metabolism to regulate weight, and ensuring digestive waste is easy to eliminate. Our gut flora is constantly under assault There is a strong connection between the kind of food we eat and what happ…

REPRINTED FROM BEYOND HEALTH® News by Raymond Francis All mammals eat raw food.  Unfortunately for us, humans have departed from what nature intended, and we are paying a heavy price for this foolishness.  One of the most egregious assaults on the nutritional quality of our food is cooking.  Heat damages nutrients, makes food more difficult to digest, and high heat even creates carcinogenic (cancer-causing) toxins. Cooked foods will not support healthy life in animals or humans.  Accordingly, some researchers have suggested a diet of at least 50% raw foods.  Others have suggested at least 80%.  The long-lived Hunza people ate about 80% of their diet fresh and raw.  What is the ideal percentage?  Nobody really knows.  It may be 100%. As I was researching the effects of food processing, I came across some shocking experiments.  I found that a calf would die from its own mother's milk, if that milk had been cooked (pasteurized).  As a chemist, I knew that heat altered the chem…

REPRINTED FROM BEYOND HEALTH® News By Hyla Cass, MD We have been called a pill-popping society, and statistics bear this out. Nearly 50 percent of American adults take at least one prescription drug, and 20 percent take three or more. In a survey, more than half of those over 65 and 30 percent of people 45-to-65 used at least three prescription drugs in a onemonth period. With our increasing reliance on medications comes nutrient depletion, a problem we can’t ignore. Every medication, including over-the-counter drugs, will drain the body of specific nutrients. On top of this, most Americans are already suffering from nutrient depletion. In fact, many of the conditions we see in everyday practice may actually be related to this deficiency. The good news is that with the right supplements, you can avoid depletion side effects, and even better, you may be able to control and prevent chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. I have seen case a…

REPRINTED FROM BEYOND HEALTH® News By Brianna Grigsby “Got milk?” We see it all the time, on T-shirts, television commercials and advertisements. “Milk…it does a body good,” we are told by the media and the dairy industry. If you don’t drink milk, where are you going to get your calcium? Will you end up with osteoporosis? What about vitamin D? These are the kinds of questions that immediately pop into most people’s minds when it is suggested that they or somebody else stop consuming milk. I remember being angry and confused when I first discovered information that seemed to prove that milk and dairy products were not the healthy foods I believed them to be. As a child and young teenager, I religiously drank my milk, thinking that I was doing my body a favor. Perhaps you feel angry that I even suggest that milk is not the great health food it is touted to be. Consider the facts: All cow’s milk, including “organic” milk, contains more than 50 active hormones, scores of allergens…

REPRINTED FROM BEYOND HEALTH® News By Raymond Francis People often ask, “Why should I exercise?” Others say, “I’m too busy, I don’t have time.” Here is what you need to know. Without movement, life cannot exist. At the molecular level, movement is the essence of life, and moving our bodies is essential to health. With more than three out of four Americans suffering from at least one chronic disease, the need to get moving is more important than ever. A recent explosion of studies about the benefits of regular exercise have shown a strong connection between inactivity and many health problems ranging from cancer to depression, dementia, diabetes, arthritis and premature death. We are all made of little microscopic units of life called cells. We started life as a single cell in our mother. Each cell is a separate unit of life, and while we think of our body as one thing, in truth it is a community of tens of trillions of cells all acting together to allow us to do the things we…

. . . can your gut’s microflora impact your weight? Anyone who’s ever tried losing weight and failed knows just how hard it is. Whether it’s the latest diet craze, workout routine, prescription drug, or hypnosis program...the most popular solutions do little to help you drop weight and keep it off. In fact, most people are disappointed to discover that all their hard work actually added a few pounds. So it’s no surprise the latest statistics from the American Heart Association indicate the epidemic of overweight Americans continues uninterrupted. It revealed that 23.9 million children ages 19 and under and 154.7 million men and women ages 20 and above are overweight or obese. These numbers are staggering considering we’ve written before on how significant weight gain has serious consequences on one’s health. Overweight and obese people suffer much greater incidences of diseases—including breast cancer, colorectal cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, stroke, catarac…

REPRINTED FROM BEYOND HEALTH® News By Russell L. Blaylock, M.D Over 460,000 people per year are now dying of a disorder called sudden cardiac death according to CDC statistics. This is a condition striking otherwise healthy people, who have experienced no obvious symptoms of heart disease prior to their deaths. An alarming number of these deaths are occurring in young athletes, both in high schools, colleges, as well as among professional athletes. While cardiologists have found coronary disease and suspect previous scars from silent heart attacks in a number of these individuals, one mechanism is getting no attention at all, and that is excitotoxic damage caused by food additives and the artificial sweetener aspartame. This is despite growing evidence that the excitotoxic mechanism plays a major role in cardiac disease. Previously, it was thought that excitotoxin food additives, such as monosodium glutamate and aspartic acid in aspartame, cause their damage in the cardiova…