For decades, pioneer doctors have used vitamin C with spectacular results when nothing else was working to save patients’ lives during viral epidemics and pandemics. Not in the puny doses employed by researchers who sought to discredit Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling’s claim that he’d found the cure for the common cold, but in megadoses, up to 150 grams a day intravenously (IV). However their work, even when they painstakingly recorded it in medical journals, was summarily dismissed by the medical establishment.  In a desperate search to help patients dying of COVID-19 related respiratory failure, the Chinese began using high-dose IV vitamin C, and last month the Shanghai government announced its official recommendation that COVID-19 should be treated with intravenous vitamin C at dosages equal to about 4-16 grams depending on body weight and severity of disease. Since IV vitamin C is ten times more powerful than oral vitamin C, this dosage would equal 40-160 grams…

Mental imagery—the practice of allowing images (sometimes pictures, sometimes just a “felt sense”) to emerge from the subconscious mind—has been used throughout human history to seek insight and wisdom for healing and for solving problems. I would like to share a recent experience of it with you as an invitation to try it for yourself as a way to deal with our anxiety-filled COVID-19 world. It requires some investment of time to learn, but in my experience it offers rich rewards.  To get a clearer picture of an underlying feeling of anxiety that had been with me since the beginning of the pandemic I set a timer for 20 minutes and began by sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the floor in my living room, with my eyes closed.  I then paid attention to my breath, letting it help me become more quiet and settle into the present moment.    As I tried to get a mental image for my feeling of anxiety I sensed I was in a forest and that a…

A recent Harris Poll commissioned by the Samueli Integrative Health Foundation found that 80% of the more than 2,000 representative adults surveyed in the U.S. say they intend to become more mindful about practicing self-care as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It seems that COVID-19 has been a wake-up call for most Americans. For many years the medical-pharmaceutical establishment has cultivated an unhealthy dependency on doctors and their prescriptions or surgeries to get us well when we get sick.  What patients can do for themselves in terms of building health with good diet and healthy lifestyle is often minimized and even actively discouraged by doctors.  Thus, cancer patients are told it doesn’t matter what they eat—that they can eat sugar, and they’ll be fine as long as they get their chemotherapy or radiation.  Heart patients are told by their doctors to skip vitamins and rely instead on harmful medications.  But with COVID-19, w…

Most people have heard of Louis Pasteur, a famous French biologist and chemist who lived during the 19 th century and invented “pasteurization.” As a proponent of the “germ theory of disease” (the belief that disease is caused by germs), Pasteur is one of the fathers of modern medicine.  However there were equally well-known scientists in Pasteur’s day who didn’t agree with him. Germs, they argued, couldn’t gain a foothold in a truly healthy body.  Chief among these critics was physiologist Claude Bernard. Bernard held that our body’s “inner terrain” (or immune system) determines our health. He is unknown today because his ideas lost out to the germ theory. But Pasteur himself is reputed to have said on his deathbed, “Bernard was right. The microbe [germ] is nothing; the terrain is everything.”  So it’s dismaying that the advice given to the public regarding COVID-19 seems to be based on the theory that “the virus is everything; the terrain…

When Dr. John J. Cannell was a psychiatrist working at a state prison hospital, unlike fellow doctors he gave his patients nutritional supplements to help them achieve better mental health.  Among these supplements were relatively large doses of vitamin D.  When a virulent influenza epidemic hit the hospital, every ward fell prey to the disease … except his ward, which remained disease free! This was one of many experiences with vitamin D that motivated Dr. Cannell to found the Vitamin D Council, a nonprofit educational organization that promotes vitamin D research and publicizes the widespread vitamin D deficiencies in our world population that have been implicated in all kinds of disease, including arthritis, cancer, heart disease, depression, diabetes, inflammation, musculoskeletal disorders, neurological problems, women's health issues, and weak immunity.  One reason the Coronavirus is ripping through the world’s population so ferociously is that coll…

The good news about COVID-19 is that we can defeat this virus!  We’re learning more all the time about how to avoid contact with it, but even if the virus should find its way into our bodies, we can fortify our immune systems with nutrients comprising a mighty internal armoring system. Combining vitamin C, vitamin D, quercetin and zinc with a good diet and a high-quality multivitamin-mineral offers powerful protection against any virus that comes our way.   Ignored, minimized and invalidated by major media, building and maintaining a strong immune system is our only real defense against COVID-19. Focusing only on avoidance and waiting like sitting ducks for a vaccine to save us is dis-empowering and strips us of potent tools that are at our disposal—nutrients that have been shown in numerous studies and clinical situations to ramp up immune defenses in an extremely effective way. It’s not that easy for a virus to take hold in the body. Should it gain entry, it must first att…

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 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…

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…

About one in 23 men and one in 25 women in the US will develop colon cancer during their lifetimes.  Although using colonoscopies to find and remove cancerous polyps has reduced the overall death rate from colon cancer, among people younger than age 55, deaths from colon cancer have increased 2 percent per year from 2007 and 2016. Could there be a relationship between colon cancer and the observation that almost all Americans are deficient in fiber?  We think so. So did a group of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, who joined forces with the University of KwaZulu in rural Africa to compare the diets of African Americans and rural Africans.  African Americans have especially high rates of colon cancer, 13 times higher than rural Africans; and the researchers hypothesized that the rural Africans’ high-fiber, low-fat diets had something to do with this. To test their ideas, the researchers compared the diets and also the microbiota (gut bugs) of a…

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…

The secret to erasing arthritic pain is reducing inflammation. This is because inflammation does two things: it produces the swelling and sensitivity that causes pain, and it releases chemicals that break down protective cartilage around your joints, which causes even more pain over time. So if you can reduce inflammation, you can both alleviate pain and disability now AND prevent further deterioration of your joints.  Anti-inflammatory drugs like Advil and Tylenol are generally recommended for this purpose, however every one of them has serious harmful side effects, one of them being long-term destruction of joint cartilage ! As the drugs cause your joints to continue to deteriorate, you will of course need more and more of the drug to manage your pain, and this will cause even more deterioration. The good news is that it’s possible to live a pain-free life even with advanced osteoarthritis! In fact, patients with no cartilage left to cushion one or m…

Researched extensively since the 1990s, more than 120 clinical trials and thousands of research papers have focused on curcumin’s remarkable health benefits. What is curcumin?  Curcumin is the principal active ingredient of turmeric, the spice that gives Indian curries their golden color. In India, turmeric is revered as “holy powder,” and it has played a major role in traditional Ayurvedic (Indian) medicine for centuries. Curcumin is now being studied in search of possible remedies for some of the major epidemics of our time. Curcumin beneficially affects the expression of more than 700 genes and influences numerous biochemical pathways at the same time. Its unique and powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects make it extraordinarily beneficial for every system in the body.  Arthritis and any other "itis."  If you've got any of the "itis" diseases, your symptoms are caused by chronic inflammation. Studies have shown that curc…

As studies on its remarkable benefits continue to accumulate, supplemental curcumin is becoming increasingly popular, with a host of different products and formulations, at a wide range of prices, each claiming to be the best.  As a consumer, how can you evaluate the different products out there?  There are certain things you can look for on a product label, but all too often the information you really need isn’t on the label, and sometimes what’s on the label isn’t even in the product!  For example, a report from Consumer Lab, which tests various supplements and makes this information known to the public, found that 20% of the turmeric/curcumin supplements they tested delivered less than 15% of the amount of curcumin claimed on the product label! Also, contaminants, like lead, which was recently found in curcumin coming from Bangladesh, would hardly be listed on any label. A major question when it comes to curcumin is bioavailability. There are various…

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…