More than 80% of the US population has too much sugar in their blood. Although only about 10% of these have outright diabetes, all are being harmed by a process called glycation, in which body proteins get “sugar-coated,” damaging blood vessels, nerves, the brain, the eyes, and even DNA, and releasing harmful chemicals causing oxidation and inflammation. This is why diabetics have so many “diabetic complications,” like heart disease, kidney disease, neuropathies, and liver disorders. To a lesser extent, high blood sugar contributes to these same problems in non-diabetics. How can you tell if you’re among this 80%? By getting your fasting blood sugar measured—it should be 75-85 mg/dL. But even with good blood sugar levels after fasting, you may be having unhealthy blood sugar spikes after meals. These too can be measured and should be less than 120 mg/dL one hour after eating. Blood-sugar problems tend to increase with age (while about 9% of the US population has diabetes, more t…

Fish oil can help you live a long life and, even better, a long and HEALTHY life.  Based on their analysis of 23 different studies involving more than a million participants, Chinese researchers recently concluded that Omega-3 fatty acids (such as are found in fish oil) reduced the risk of all-cause mortality by 7% for every 200 mg per day consumed.  But what is a long life worth if it’s not healthy?  The good news is that fish oil increases longevity because it makes us healthier.  Not only has fish oil been shown to help prevent all kinds of disease including cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders like diabetes, neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disease, kidney and pancreas disorders, periodontal disease and cancer, it helps keep our telomeres long! What are telomeres?  Telomeres are caps at the ends of chromosomes found in each cell. Like the tips on the ends of shoestrings, they keep DNA strands toget…

Humans evolved to spend our days hunting and gathering in the great outdoors, getting plenty of exercise, excitement, camaraderie, fresh air and sun. Those were the good old days when the best things in life were free, including a flood of summer sunlight that created as much vitamin D as it penetrated our bare skin as we would need all year round.  But we moved further and further from the equator, where sunlight is most abundant, and began spending more and more of our lives indoors. We adopted a less healthy diet with fewer and fewer fresh fruits and vegetables with their antioxidants that protected us from potential damage by the sun, and medical authorities began recommending sun avoidance and sunscreens, the weakest of which (PF8) block 95% of the sun’s vitamin-D producing UVB rays. (See here on using the sun intelligently to still get free vitamin D.) Vitamin D deficiency is now so widespread that alternative doctors say virtually every new pa…

The Sugar Season will soon be upon us!  Halloween candy, Thanksgiving pies, sugary Christmas treats and holiday cookies and cakes in between, until New Year’s Eve, when we all resolve to eat healthier next year! But Americans overindulge on sugar all year long. According to nutrition experts at Tufts University , we each average 30 teaspoons of added sugar (sugar not naturally found in foods) daily—over 100 pounds of sugar per person per year!  So what’s the harm in adding a little sweetness to our lives?  Well, a little is fine—2 pieces of fresh fruit a day and even occasional treats made with honey and other natural sweeteners.  But the huge quantities of refined white sugar, and high fructose corn syrup in processed foods, that have become a normal part of the American diet are a major cause of disability and disease. Numerous studies link excess sugar consumption with arthritis, age-related macular degeneration and cataracts…

Life is hard enough without making losing weight more difficult than it needs to be.  Some helpful scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School proved that you don’t need to restrict calories or saturated fat to lose weight as long as you’re getting adequate dietary fiber! These scientists found 240 pre-diabetic patients and assigned them to one of two groups. The first group followed a weight-loss diet that restricted calories and saturated fat. The second group was simply asked to get at least 30 grams of fiber daily from a high-fiber diet, including plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Neither group was asked to change their exercise habits. At the end of one year, both groups had lost the same amount of weight.  In addition, both groups had had similar drops in cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and inflammation.  In other words, both groups reduced their risk factors similarly for diabetes…

Would you believe there was a time when human beings didn’t get constipated?  That’s what Dr. Denis Burkitt found in the 1970s when he studied healthy Africans eating traditional high-fiber diets. Nor did they get conditions associated with constipation like diverticulitis, gallstones, hemorrhoids, polyps, colon cancer, diabetes, obesity, varicose veins, high cholesterol, blood clots, and other cardiovascular issues.    While these Africans got 40-100 grams of fiber daily, the average American gets about 15. Could this explain why so many of us are constipated?  Absolutely! Fiber deficiency is a major factor in our constipation epidemic!  Transit time is the time it takes for food to go from mouth to anus and out. An ideal transit time is 12-18 hours.  Faster isn’t good because time is needed to absorb nutrients from food.  But most people have the opposite problem: a sluggish bowel. This means toxic wastes don’t get eliminated fast eno…

If you’re between the ages of 23 and 38, you’re one of the nearly 73 million people in the US classified as “millennial.”  And chances are you think, like 83% of millennials, that you’re in excellent health. Think again! A 2019 report from Blue Cross Blue Shield indicates trouble is brewing beneath the surface. It found that millennials had far worse health than the previous Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980). In fact, millennials are experiencing an unprecedented decline in their health when they reach their late 20s—sharply declining at age 27. This is alarming and unprecedented! The report showed that from 2014 to 2017 millennials, in just three years, experienced double-digit increases of eight of the top ten medical conditions. Millennials had 21% more cardiovascular problems, 18% more major depression, 37% more hyperactivity, 19% more diabetes, 15% more endocrine problems, 11% more “tobacco use disorder” and 11% more disease overall. Mill…

It comes in a small roll of litmus paper that you keep in your bathroom. Just tear off a piece and pass it through your first urine each morning before eating or drinking anything. Then compare the color of the wet litmus paper to the accompanying chart to find your magic number! This number measures the acidity/alkalinity (also called pH) of your urine, which is a good indicator of the acidity/alkalinity inside your cells. The number 7 indicates neutral (neither acid nor alkaline); the numbers less than 7 indicate increasing levels of acidity; the numbers above 7, increasing levels of alkalinity.  If you’re familiar with Beyond Health, you know that we believe that all the many diseases are really only one disease called MALFUNCTIONING CELLS.  If we can keep our cells healthy, it’s impossible to get sick! So knowing the condition of our cells is invaluable information, and this simple test allows you to get a glimpse inside your cells to s…

If you’re reading this, you probably care about your health and try to eat a good diet. But more than 95 percent of the US population isn’t getting enough of this often neglected nutrient: fiber, and that very likely includes you! The indigestible portion of plant foods, fiber goes far beyond improving digestion and elimination. Fiber is responsible for creating a healthy environment in your gut so that healthy bacteria (probiotics) can flourish and pathogenic bacteria and other bad guys like yeasts and parasites are held in check.  The conglomeration of good and bad bugs in your gut is called your microbiome. Without enough fiber, you get a sick microbiome; without a healthy microbiome, you get a sick body. It’s that simple. Without adequate fiber all types of disease thrive, including constipation, diverticulitis, gallstones, hemorrhoids, polyps, cancer, diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, varicose veins, high cholesterol, heart disease, obesity, depression and…

Most of us know about “silent killers,” like high blood pressure, insulin resistance, and certain cancers that we can have for years without being aware of it.  But while conventional medicine has expensive tests for (and drugs to treat) these silent killers, a more fundamental silent killer, acidosis, is largely ignored.  What is acidosis?  It’s simply having too much acid in the trillions of body cells that make up our bodies. Most of our population in the US suffer from one degree or another of acidosis, usually unwittingly. And it’s killing us! pH is a measure along a continuum that runs from highly acidic to highly alkaline. The pH of our body fluids, especially the fluids in and around our cells, needs to be slightly alkaline in order for cells to function normally. Acidosis causes cells to malfunction, resulting in a host of other diseases and dysfunctions, including high blood pressure, insulin resistance and cancer. What other problems are a…

By the age of 45, one-third of all Americans have a potentially hazardous condition called diverticulosis in their colons. Half of Americans aged 60-80 develop this condition and almost everyone over the age of 90. In diverticulosis, the wall of the colon balloons out forming a pouch, or a pocket called a diverticulum (plural diverticula).  Diverticula range in size from a pea to a thimble. By themselves, diverticula aren’t a problem, but up to 25% of the time they progress to diverticulitis, a very painful and even potentially life-threatening situation.  Diverticulitis occurs when fecal matter and pathogenic bacteria get stuck in the diverticula leading to infection and inflammation.  It causes severe pain, fever, cramping, muscle spasms, bloating and nausea. Although it’s rare, sometimes the pressure inflamed diverticula exert on the colon wall cause perforation of the bowel, a life-threatening situation as bowel contents spill out infecting the whole abdo…

We’ve been telling you how important it is to get 40-100 grams of dietary fiber in your diet daily to support a healthy gut population of good bacteria (probiotics), which in turn probably does more to ensure the health of your whole body than any other single factor. And we’ve told you that at least 95 percent of the US population doesn’t get enough fiber, and challenged you to calculate how much fiber you get on a daily basis. Odds are you came up short.  We did when we took the Fiber Challenge ourselves!  It takes a lot of consciousness to include 40-100 grams of fiber in a day’s diet! We’ve found a few simple ways to include more fiber that we’d like to share with you. But first, don’t start bombarding your intestines with a huge quantity of fiber all at once! This could lead to constipation and bad flatulence. Instead, measure your average fiber intake and add more gradually, a maximum of 5 grams a day, interspersed throughout the day, un…

Over the past weeks, we’ve told you why you’ve got to have adequate fiber if you want to achieve and maintain optimal health. Fiber is sorely lacking in the American diet, and even if you eat an exemplary diet it’s easy to fall short of the 40-100 grams per day recommended for a healthy colon.  To help fill the gap, we offer Beyond Health’s Dietary Fiber Formula , one of the most advanced combinations of health-promoting fibers on the market today. These fibers help propel the stool through the intestines by softening it and adding bulk, but that’s just the beginning. These same fibers are fermented by friendly colonic bacteria (probiotics) to create food for themselves AND food for the important cells lining the intestines. Thus, healthy probiotic populations are encouraged to thrive, and intestinal linings are strengthened and renewed. IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO TAKE PROBIOTICS BY THEMSELVES!  You must have fiber to feed these friendly bacteria or they w…

There’s a good reason why Asians who consume lots of curries retain sharp mental function and little cognitive decline with age. It’s turmeric, the spice that gives curries their golden color. More specifically, it’s the curcumin found in turmeric. The best way to maintain a healthy, highly functional brain is to prevent out-of-control brain oxidation (“brain rust”) and its partner in crime, brain inflammation (“brain on fire”). And one of the best supplements you can take to do this is curcumin, an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory that is uniquely beneficial to the brain. A recent double-blind, placebo-controlled trial done at UCLA found that when older adults with mild memory complaints were given just 180 milligrams of curcumin a day for a year and a half, they significantly improved their performance on memory and attention tests, enhanced their mood, and had less amyloid and tau (associated with Alzheimer’s disease) in the parts of their brains that control memory and…

“Controlling the triggers of age-related inflammation could extend healthspan.”–Yale School of Medicine. Allergies, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease—almost every American today is already suffering or will suffer at some point in their lifetimes from an inflammatory-related disease like these. But it doesn’t need to be that way! You can spot inflammation and subdue it before it gets out of control and leads to a chronic disease! What exactly is inflammation? Inflammation is the body’s healing response to injury, illness or infection. It brings heat and extra blood supplies where repairs are needed. After the job has been done, the inflammatory process should shut down.  But sometimes it doesn’t.  Instead, it smolders on, becoming chronic inflammation. Nutrient deficiencies and toxicities encourage chronic inflammatory fires that smolder and build until one day they flare up and burn out of control, producing disease. I…

Although these stressful times can lead to sleepless nights, it’s important for all kinds of health reasons to make the effort to get enough good quality sleep.  But the most pertinent reason right now is that it helps prevent viral infections. But how much sleep do you need to avoid getting a cold or perhaps COVID-19? According to a 2015 study, the answer is more than 6 hours a night. While poor sleep and not getting enough sleep had been implicated before in increased susceptibility to infectious illness, prior studies relied on subjective measures—that is individuals’ own assessments of their experience.  This study was different in that it used an objective measure called wrist actigraphy to assess occurrences of the common cold after the researchers gave 164 healthy participants nasal drops containing the rhinovirus.  Like COVID-19, the common cold is a coronavirus that infects the respiratory system. The study’s conclusion? Less sleep increased ris…

Sometimes the simplest health practices are the most powerful.  Unfortunately we tend to forget or minimize them as we run after the latest supplement du jour.  But if you want strong immune protection against the COVID-19 virus, getting plenty of pure water is critical. Even a small amount of dehydration will negatively affect all the chemistry in your body. Yet studies show that most people are chronically dehydrated, especially over the age of fifty. In addition, we’re all under extra stress these days, and stress itself is dehydrating.  Here are eight ways staying well-hydrated supports your immune system: Almost all biochemical reactions involve water, and every cell depends upon water to wash away waste and toxins (including viruses) and to supply nutrients.  Your immune system relies on your bloodstream to transport oxygen and other nutrients and important communication signals to your organs. This transportation is less efficient when…

Doing nothing is better than wasting time – Viktoras Kulvinskas Feelings of anxiety and stress have become an unavoidable aspect of life in this new COVID-19 era. Yet stress reduction is something we are advised to include in our antiviral lifestyle—a real Catch-22! But there are simple ways to reduce our stress overload, and they’re free and close at hand.  It just means making the time to include them in our lives.  What exactly is the problem with stress?  Well, for one thing it promotes the release of adrenal hormones that knock out immunity!  A good example of this is the increase in the number of colds college students get during exam time.  Stress can also activate latent viruses we usually carry around with us without a problem, as someone who experiences Herpes I and II outbreaks can attest.  Stress can also interfere with sleep—so important for strong immunity, and it can nudge us into unhealthy habits like overeating, eating the…