It may seem like a simple mathematical equation:  One pound equals about 3,500 calories. If you want to lose one pound, you simply eat less and/or exercise more so that you consume 3,500 less calories than you’re burning. But the truth is more complex. Although if you eat less and exercise more, you can lose weight, most people who take this limited approach have a hard time and often wind up like our friend Debby who reported, “I exhausted myself losing five pounds, but they found me again!” As Raymond Francis says in Never Be Fat Again, overweight is a disease, a disease that can only be cured by normalizing body chemistry. This is done by permanently adopting a holistic lifestyle that supplies the body with all the nutrients it needs to be healthy, and eliminates toxins that interfere with good health. A body in optimal health sustains self-healing, self-regulating mechanisms that automatically shed excess pounds and then maintain a healthy weight. Regular exercise is…

While the world’s attention is riveted by COVID-19, pervasive magnesium deficiency has been an ongoing health crisis for at least sixty years, causing death, disease, and reduced quality of life. Magnesium plays many important roles in heart health, and a deficiency of this important mineral is a major risk factor for having a sudden, fatal heart attack! As one of the body’s most significant anti-inflammatory compounds, magnesium also helps to prevent the chronic diseases that plague our time, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other “co-morbidities” that increase chances of being hospitalized with and dying from COVID-19. In fact, virtually every known illness can be associated with magnesium deficiency.  Magnesium plays many essential roles in the immune system. It contributes significantly to anti-viral immunity, and has other properties that may make it especially useful for COVID-19. Meanwhile, low magnesium levels can seri…

Years ago we heard an intriguing story. A frail, elderly gentleman in India, bent over with age, left his village to wander into the woods to die. Several years later he returned, vigorous, upright and tanned from the sun, claiming he had been rejuvenated by communing with the rocks, the trees, and the mountain streams.This story came out of Asia’s ancient tradition of nature therapy recently revived in Japan under the name of shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” Forest bathing is immersing yourself in a forest environment. This means leaving your cell phone and daily concerns behind and spending several hours deep in the woods, walking on trails or sitting with no other purpose than to experience your surroundings through all five senses: smelling the woodsy air; feeling the ground beneath your feet or the bark of a tree or the texture of a leaf; tasting a blackberry or wild mint; listening to bird calls and the sound of the wind rustling through the trees; and taking in the varied si…

Would you like to be smarter? Of course, you would! Who wouldn’t want to be able to bring laser-like attention to the task at hand, assess all the elements in a situation quickly, analyze how they interrelate, and remain wholeheartedly engaged and absorbed until any problem is solved creatively and effectively?Well, vitamin C supplementation can help with that, especially if you’re at all deficient — and most of us are!Recently, Korean scientists assembled a group of 241 healthy, young (ages 20-39) adults to see if their serum vitamin C levels correlated with their “mental vitality.” Indeed, it did. So the researchers went a step further. About half of these young Korean men and women had “inadequate” levels of the vitamin, which the researchers defined as being less than 0.88 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). Fifty of these vitamin C-insufficient subjects were invited to participate in a four-week experiment. Half of them took 500 mg of vitamin C twice a day, fo…

Widespread magnesium deficiency has been implicated in a host of chronic diseases, including obesity. How would healthy levels of magnesium in our cells help us to attain and maintain a healthy weight, and how does magnesium deficiency sabotage those goals? Fatigue. The number one complaint patients bring to doctors is “feeling tired.” Being unable to lose weight probably ranks a close second.  The two concerns are related: It’s hard to eat less and exercise more when you’re already feeling tired all the time. Fatigue is one of the first signs of magnesium deficiency. Magnesium and the B vitamins are our main energy nutrients, involved in almost every step of energy creation in the cells’ energy factories, the mitochondria. Nutrient Deficiency. Magnesium and the B's activate enzymes that control digestion, absorption and utilization of all three macronutrients—fats, proteins, and carbohydrates—making the vitamins and minerals they contain available for our bodies to use.…

The most common complaint bringing patients to doctors’ offices these days is low energy.  Most often, if you go in complaining of fatigue, after a battery of tests, you will be told there’s nothing wrong with you. Well, although it may not show up in their tests, there is something wrong! Low energy means not only that you don’t have the energy to do what you want to do; it means your body doesn’t have the energy to do what it needs to do to keep you healthy. In fact, the amount of energy your body can make may be the single most important measurement of your health. It’s important to get to the bottom of what’s going on.  (A doctor who specializes in functional medicine may find answers that conventional doctors don’t.) One of the most common reasons for low energy today is a sluggish liver. The liver is the largest and most hard-working gland in your body, performing over 500 essential functions, and when it isn’t up to par, every other system in your body suffers as a…

The school year is back and we have some tips on how to cold and flu-proof your child.Children need special nutritional support as they head back to school each fall. Any gathering of kids creates a perfect opportunity for germs to spread, and no sooner has the school year gotten underway then flu season beginning.How can you strengthen your child’s immune system and avoid winter colds and flus?Number one, banish sugar from your child’s diet. Even a small amount of refined sugar can suppress your child’s immune system for hours. Immune cells need a lot of vitamin C to function normally, but sugar, which has a chemical structure similar to vitamin C, competes with the vitamin to enter the cells, creating an artificial vitamin C shortage. Avoid fruit juices (including orange juice), which are also too high in sugar. Whole fruits, however, are fine in moderation.Feed your child the right fats. Trans fats and excess omega 6 fats (found in supermarket vegetable oils) depress immunity,…

Feeling tired all the time? Cold intolerant? Depressed? Constipated? Losing your hair? Do you gain weight easily, or have muscle or joint pain, or are you forgetful and unable to concentrate? These are some of the major symptoms of hypothyroidism, a condition in which your thyroid gland is not producing enough thyroid hormone or not enough hormone is getting into your cells to do its job. If hypothyroidism is a problem for you, you may be surprised to learn that fluoride, which is dumped by the ton into much of our public water, was once used as a medication for deliberately suppressing thyroid function in cases of overactive thyroid. Why are we dumping a thyroid-suppressing drug into our public water?  Good question! Even the government’s National Research Council voiced concern about fluoride’s effects on the thyroid in a 2006 report. They found “clear evidence” that amounts of fluoride at or near levels added to US water present potential risks to the thyroid gland.…