There are some taxes you have to pay, or risk going to jail! But others you can avoid, like the tax on your health every time you take an impure, poorly formulated supplement contaminated with solvent residues, artificial colors, and flavors, allergens and/or other potentially harmful chemicals. When shopping for supplements, people often don’t take this tax into account. If they did, they’d realize that the cheapest brands are usually the worst bargains. Not only do these brands provide little or no benefit, they tax your body with toxins that interfere with healthy body chemistry, often doing more harm than good. You may pay good money for something that detracts from rather than adding to your health. Supplement ingredients come in a wide range of purities. The purer the ingredient, the safer and more effective it will be. Although purer ingredients are almost always considerably more expensive, at Beyond Health we use only the purest ingredients available so you get maximum…

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…

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…

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…

Roberto Assagioli MD was an Italian psychoanalysis who was a contemporary and student of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.  But he was also deeply influenced by his mother, a serious student of Eastern religion.  He wound up combining Western science with Eastern spirituality in a new type of psychotherapy called psychosynthesis.  But more than his credentials, Roberto, as he was known, exhibited a calm sense of joyfulness and kindness that was quite independent of external events.  People reported feeling happy just being around him. So he can be considered an expert on the subject of serenity. In this anxious COVID-19 time, we might benefit from the following exercise he advocated for cultivating serenity, copied from his book, Psychosynthesis: EXERCISE FOR EVOKING SERENITY Assume a physical attitude of serenity: relax all muscular and nervous tension; breathe slowly and rhythmically; express serenity on your face with a smile.  (You can hel…

Scientists from China to Great Britain are investigating the likelihood that vitamin D supplementation can dramatically reduce the severity of COVID-19 as well as its number of fatalities. We already know that adequate amounts of vitamin D are essential to immune function, and many Americans have begun proactively taking substantial doses.  In response, CNN is warning the public that taking too much of this essential nutrient can be dangerous.  But while the danger of getting too much vitamin D is negligible, the danger that we’re taking too little is huge! Too much of anything isn’t good for you—even water.  In a contest in which the contestants tried to drink as much water as they could as fast as they could, the “winner” reportedly died! In contrast, no one has ever died of a vitamin overdose, including vitamin D.  In enormous doses—many times more than the most enthusiastic vitamin D advocate would ever recommend—vitamin D can be harmful.  …

Certain populations have borne the brunt of COVID-19 illness and deaths; and they all are especially likely to be deficiency in vitamin D.  Older folks don’t fare well with the virus. Adults over 65 years of age represent 80% of hospitalizations & have a 23-fold greater risk of death than younger people. The elderly are likely to be vitamin D deficient due to inadequate diet and also because as we age we become less able to manufacture vitamin D in our skin from sunshine. Almost everyone who has died of COVID disease had co-morbidities, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, high blood pressure, cancer, lung disease, neurological disease, kidney disease or obesity. Scientific studies have associated all of these conditions with vitamin D deficiency.  Now it has become apparent that significantly more people of color are contracting and dying from COVID-19 than their white counterparts.  Although black Americans repre…

A recently published Opinion Article suggests that the omega-3 fatty acids EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) may have an important role to play in preventing or at least managing the so-called “cytokine storm” that has caused the deaths of many COVID-19 patients. The authors say that supplementing with these two omega-3 fatty acids should be "considered as both a supportive therapy and a prevention strategy" in patients infected with the virus. Cytokines are protein messengers in the body that initiate and regulate the immune system’s response to an attack, including its inflammatory response. Inflammation is used to kill invading pathogens, but if it isn’t well-regulated, it can do serious damage to healthy cells and tissues as well. This is exactly what happens in “cytokine storm.”  Cytokine storm is like an out-of-control hurricane destroying everything in its path. Many COVID-19 patients have died not from the virus itself but from this out…

When you think about immune-building nutrients, vitamin E probably isn’t among the first that come to mind.  But it should be.  Vitamin E is one of the most effective nutrients known for supporting immune function—especially when it comes to fighting off viral infections, and even a marginal deficiency will throw a monkey wrench into your immune system’s response to a challenge. Laboratory, animal and human studies have shown that vitamin E has a variety of effects on immune cell production, differentiation, proliferation and activity; that vitamin E insufficiency diminishes these effects; and that supplementing with vitamin E at higher than government recommended levels enhances them. Yet as we confront the current viral pandemic, approximately 90% of the US population isn’t getting enough vitamin E from their diets to meet even minimal government standards. The average American diet supplies less than half the government’s Recommended Dietary Intake (RD…

It was an apocalyptic experience to wake up on the morning of September 9th in San Francisco, California, to a darkened sky with an eerie orange glow. And it became stranger still when by mid-afternoon the sky hadn’t changed, as if the day had never begun.  This was a San Franciscan’s eye view of the effects of the worst fire season the West Coast has experienced ever. The air was darkened for two days by a blanket of smoke that stretched all along the coast and more than 1,000 miles west over the Pacific Ocean as wildfires raged from Washington down to Southern California.  Even those who haven’t been in the direct path of the fires leading to loss of property and life have experienced some of the worst air pollution in the world, comparable, according to a study done in Berkeley, to smoking 25 cigarettes a day.  And it didn’t help to know that the consequent lung irritation and inflammation made us more prone to lung infections, like COVID-19. What c…

Last year in an article on vaping we concluded that although it might be a slight improvement over cigarette smoking, vaping was far from safe. Since then thousands of vapers have become ill with a serious disease called Evali (e-cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury), and a recent study found that vaping greatly increases the risk of contracting COVID-19.   All the more reason to “just say no” to vaping.   A New York Times article gave a harrowing description of 20-year-old Janan Moein’s experience of Evali. After vaping regularly with a cannabis-laced brand for 6 months, Mr. Moein found himself hospitalized with a collapsed lung and in a medically-induced coma. Diagnosed with Evali, he was given a 5% chance of survival. He lost nearly 50 pounds in 2 weeks and now recalls, “My lips were blue. They had to tape my eyes shut. I was hallucinating the entire time that the nurses were trying to kill me, that the walls were made of human skin.  It was a…

The human microbiome—that 3½ to 4 pounds of bacteria, bacteriophage, fungi, protozoa, and viruses that live on and in us, primarily in our intestines, is finally getting the attention it deserves, and it’s now recognized how much these microbes, which number in the trillions, contribute to our health.They help us digest and absorb food, synthesize vitamins, produce amino acids, secrete mucus, prevent constipation by increasing motility, create food for intestinal cells, and, perhaps most importantly, partner with our immune system—60-80% of which is located in the intestines—by degrading toxins and competing with and killing off infectious bacteria and yeasts.However most of our microbiomes are in pretty bad shape, and in a recent article in the Townsend Letter, pharmacist Ross Pelton, who is also a nutritionist with a Ph.D. in psychology and holistic health, explains why.He compares the situation to a “perfect storm” of factors that have conspired to assault and damage…

. . . yet another assault on our food systemOver the holidays, the Food and Drug Administration took a major step toward approving the first genetically-engineered (GE) fish, a salmon designed to over-produce growth hormone so that it becomes twice as big as normal salmon. This monstrosity has been nicknamed “frankenfish.” Only a massive protest from the public (that means us!) can block approval.Salmon used to be one of the healthiest foods on the planet, but not anymore. As a large fatty fish high on the food chain, salmon concentrates toxins which have proliferated in our oceans in its fatty tissues. While wild salmon is still an acceptable food in small quantities, farmed salmon is not. A 2004 study in the journal Science that analyzed salmon from all over the world found that farmed salmon contained substantially more toxins than wild-caught. These factory-farmed fish are fed a toxic diet and given growth hormones and antibiotics. Because they develop an unappetizing whitish/grey…

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…

Climate change is making life tougher for those with allergies, but it’s possible to be allergy-free. A European study published online concluded that allergic reactions to ragweed (the most common cause of what is known as “hay fever”) are in fact getting worse; people who are already sensitive to ragweed are becoming more sensitive, and more and more people who never had problems before are becoming allergic. In fact, in 25-40 years, these researchers estimate the population of Europeans sensitive to ragweed will double, from 33 million to 77 million. Although this study was done in Europe, similar factors, associated with climate change, are at work here in the US. As explained by Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the US Department of Agriculture, warmer temperatures and higher levels of carbon dioxide have encouraged ragweed growth, producing a larger plant and about ten times more ragweed pollen. In addition, it appears that this pollen is a more potent allergen.The Europea…

Taking showers can cause cancer! Twenty years ago the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed hot showers on their list of cancer sources. The main culprit was chlorine. Chlorine is a poisonous chemical, a bleaching agent. Sure, it does a great job of killing living things in our water, like bacteria and viruses. The problem is we’re living things too. Chlorine gas was used as a deadly weapon during World War I! Chlorine is a pro-oxidant that causes free radical damage in the body, a major factor in aging and in every kind of disease. Chlorine and its by-products have been linked with various forms of cancer, neurological issues, reproductive problems, heart disease (including atherosclerosis and hypertension), decreased immunity, allergies, hypothyroidism and lung problems. When you smell chlorine in your shower, it’s because it’s escaping into the air as chlorine gas. Since showers are usually poorly ventilated, chlorine gas concentrations can be quite high. In sufficient…

Egyptian researchers have compared the supplement CoQ10 to diabetes drug glimepiride in treating rats that had been artificially given type 2 diabetes. CoQ10 had marked positive effects on 15 different factors that either cause or prevent/reverse diabetes, surpassing glimepiride in all but 5. Most importantly, CoQ10 has no negative side effects, while there are many problems with glimepiride. Glimepiride belongs to a class of diabetes drugs called sulfonylureas that force the pancreas to produce more insulin. Insulin is a hormone that ushers sugar from the blood into body cells, so it can be stored or burned as energy. Type 2 diabetes occurs when cells become resistant to insulin and sugar accumulates in the blood. While increasing insulin will get sugar into the cells, it creates new problems. High insulin levels are inflammatory, causing aging and all manner of disease including heart disease and obesity. (Sulfonylurea side effects include weight gain and increased risk of…

Vitamin B12 and folate (aka vitamin B9) work together in a very productive partnership. Unfortunately, government statistics show that 30% of the US population is deficient in vitamin B12 and 75% in folate. This is using the Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA) as a reference, which many experts believe are far too low. And since they often work together, a deficiency in one means the other won’t work as it should. So it wouldn’t be too surprising to find you’re deficient in one or both, especially if you’re over the age of 50 when both B12 and folate levels start to decline. Because these two B vitamins participate in so many different biochemical processes, deficiencies can produce a wide range of symptoms: Do you have low energy? Feel weak, or get dizzy spells? Do you find you’re getting more irritable or feeling a bit low? Is your memory getting worse? Is it harder to learn new things; easier to get distracted and confused?  Do you have balance, vision or hearing proble…