Could Magnesium Deficiency Be Affecting Your Health? Do you experience—or have you been diagnosed with—any of the following? Neurological & Mental Health ADD / ADHD Anxiety, irritability, nervousness Depression, apathy Confusion, difficulty concentrating, memory problems Insomnia or restless sleep Extreme sensitivity to noise or pain Autism Alzheimer’s disease Parkinson’s disease Muscles, Nerves & Movement Chronic muscle tension Muscle spasms, cramps, tics, or tremors (hands, legs, feet, face) Teeth grinding Tension or migraine headaches Clumsiness or poor coordination Chronic fatigue syndrome / fibromyalgia Cardiovascular & Metabolic Health Irregular or rapid heartbeat High blood pressure Blood clots Congestive heart failure Heart disease Insulin resistance, diabetes, hypoglycemia, metabolic syndrome Digestive & Immune Health Allergies or asthma Autoimmune disease Candida or yeast infections…

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…

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…

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…

While many factors determine whether or not you will get a coronavirus infection, how bad the infection will be, and how long it will take to recover, there is one all-important factor—the state of your immunity.  Beyond Health’s protocol for building and maintaining a strong immune system includes having your vitamin D blood levels tested with a 25(OH)D test, and getting them up to 40-60 ng/mL (100-150 nmol/L) or more depending on your medical situation. Your immune system requires adequate amounts of vitamin D to function the way it’s supposed to. If you’re low on D, it’s like fighting the coronavirus with one hand tied behind your back. You can raise your vitamin D levels with sun, food and supplements. SUN Sunlight is an inexhaustible source of free vitamin D! The sun’s UVB rays convert cholesterol in the skin into vitamin D. However, since these same UVB rays cause sunburn, light-skinned people need to build up a protective tan gradually. The best approach is…

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.  …