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You can feel better! You can decrease your pain, inflammation, and possibly even slow down the …

It is officially summer and it is time to talk about skin aging, skin cancer and, most importantly, ways of protecting the skin from the “harmful rays of the sun”.

Not all saturated fat is bad! Coconut oil contains medium-chain good fats with 50-55% lauric acid, a healthful nutrient that supports the metabolism.

Many of us have had the unfortunate experience of having to watch our aging parents develop the diseases commonly associated with age. If you are like me, you have a nearly obsessive desire to make sure that we don’t follow along the same path. In order to succeed in this mission, we need to start with a paradigm that allows us to understand why we develop these diseases in the first place.

A well-respected researcher at the University of California, Berkley, has come up with a theory that may give us insight into how to avoid common diseases associated with aging, including:

1.      Heart disease (specifically calcifications of the arteries)
2.      Osteoporosis
3.      Various forms of cancer
4.      Diabetes and insulin resistance
5.      Breast fibroid
6.      Fatigue
7.      Weight gain
8.      And more…

Dr. Bruce Ames announced that he had a new theory of aging, which he named, “Triage Theory”. Triage theory states that when the body does not have sufficient nutrients to feed all tissues equally, the urgent needs of the body will outweigh the less urgent needs, even if they both share a high level of importance. A good way of illustrating this theory is to associate it with principles of time management.

I am a student of time management, mostly because I am terrible at it. One principle that is at the core of time management is the process of differentiating between urgent and important tasks and non-urgent but important tasks. Urgent/important tasks are things that need to be handled right now or you will suffer immediate consequences. Examples of urgent/important tasks include:

1.      A phone call from an important client
2.      Paying your mortgage on time
3.      Urgent staffing issues, and work emergencies.

Non-urgent/important matters are important to the long-term goals but there are few immediate consequences to not doing them. Examples include:

1.      Learning about new technology that may impact your job or business in the future
2.      Upgrading accounting software to be compliant with next year’s tax laws
3.      Setting up your next dental-hygiene appointment

If your life is filled with urgent/important tasks, usually the non-urgent/important tasks will be thrown by the wayside resulting in a lack of personal and organizational growth. In other words, the organization may remain healthy for today, but in the long run, the neglect of non-urgent-but-important matters will cause the person or organization to fail from ineptitude.

Dr. Ames suggests that the body is doing the same thing; prioritizing immediate needs above the future needs of the body.  He believes that the body does this because we evolved during a time when we weren’t expected to live to be 100 years old anyway.  Instead, nature prioritized the act of keeping us alive long enough to procreate rather than long enough to see our great grandchildren.

Iodine is a good example of how this theory presents itself within the body. When iodine is moderately deficient, the thyroid will take precedence at the expense of other tissues that need it, albeit in a less urgent manner. This assures that the body has enough iodine to keep the metabolism functioning, at the cost of long-term health of other tissues such as the breasts, prostate, and immune system.

Another example of the Triage Theory in action is vitamin K deficiency. Vitamin K has biological effect in most cells of the body including the arteries and the bones. When vitamin K is moderately deficient, the liver will snatch the vitamin K from the blood in order to make sure that it can produce clotting factors needed to prevent you from bleeding to death from a paper cut. Unfortunately, because the K is being used in developing clotting factors, the bones grow weak and the arteries develop calcifications from being slowly starved of vitamin K.

To protect against the consequences of biological triage, you must make sure that there is an abundance of nutrition that is available to the body so that both urgent/important processes and non-urgent/important processes are able to function on all cylinders. Doing so will allow you to enjoy optimal health well into your later years.

A multi-vitamin is a good start in assuring that the body has sufficient levels of the various nutrients to feed the urgent/important and non-urgent/important processes.  Unfortunately, most multi’s (even high quality multi’s) fall short in providing sufficient levels of various nutrients such as vitamin D, vitamin K and iodine. Given this fact, we typically need to supplement with higher levels of these nutrients than are supplied by a multi.

Previously, I was taking these nutrients separately. Luckily, they are now provided in a single capsule to support your current supplement program. This supplement combines 5,000 iu of vitamin D3, 1.1 mg of vitamin K2 and 1 mg of whole-food iodine. The product is called Vitamins D and K with Sea-Iodine by Life Extension Foundation.

The reason that such a blend is so powerful is because of the broad importance and the relative deficiency of these nutrients. By providing the body with optimal levels of these three nutrients, you are helping to shore up the body’s defenses against many of the previously reported disease associated with aging.

Recently a government agency known as The Institute of Medicine weighed in on the topic of vitamin D. After convening a 14 member panel of researchers to analyze over 1,000 published studies on vitamin D, the IOM made the following recommendations:

• Infants should get no more than 400 IU of vitamin D daily
• Adults should limit intake to 600 IU of vitamin D per day
• Pregnant women should get 600 IU of vitamin D per day

What’s The Harm?

The New York Times, The Wallstreet Journal and other newspapers love controversy. They published headlines such as, “Can Too Much Vitamin D Be Hazardous to Your Health?” These articles suggested that more than the 600 IU of D may pose hazards even though the IOM themselves suggested that the safe upper limit of D is 4,000 IU (up from their previous 2,000 IU recommendation).

Many people confused the recommendation to take 600 IU as an indication that more was toxic. This is an inaccurate interpretation of the IOM recommendations. Remember, the 600 IU adult dose that was suggested is a recommended daily allowance, not a suggestion that higher doses may be toxic. In the IOM’s report, they suggest that a dose over 10,000 IU per day is toxic, even though they failed to provide proof of such toxicity.

What Harm?

According to the IOM, doses over 10,000 IU could cause damage to kidneys and other tissues, once again they came to this conclusion without providing reproducible proof of such side effects. It should be noted that the body will produce up to 10,000 IU of vitamin D from simple sun exposure, is the IOM suggesting that nature messed up?

I should point out that the IOM decided on its position regarding the safety of vitamin D based on the philosophy that because there is little evidence that higher doses of D are safe, we should assume it is toxic. Although I agree that we should exercise caution when taking high doses of anything, including vitamins, I feel that they should be more responsible with how they phrase such caution.

How Do We Know That It Is Safe?

First, let me point out that even the IOM, a notoriously conservative organization, suggests that doses up to 4,000 IU appear to be safe, meaning the research suggests that there is no toxicity at this dose. In other words, if you take up to 4,000 IU per day, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. The debate is whether or not doses above this 4,000 IU range are safe.

Personally, I typically do not recommend taking more than 4,000 IU per day unless we have blood tests that suggest that we need more. If, however, blood tests continue to be suboptimal on doses of D up to 4,000 IU, is the IOM suggesting that we not take more?

What Are We Missing?

Unfortunately, it appears that the IOM is not being forthcoming with all of the recommendations from the individual experts on the panel. In fact, some of the experts on the panel were staunch advocates for the safety and efficacy of higher dose vitamin D. Their reports, however, are being suppressed by the IOM. This means we can not read the recommendations of these experts, we are only provided access to the final paper of the IOM. The Vitamin D Council is in the process of filing, under the Freedom of Information Act, a lawsuit to have those reports made public. It makes you wonder what they are hiding.

What Should You Take Away from this Paper?

The purpose of today’s article was to defend the safety record of vitamin D, not to get into the mountains of research that support the use of vitamin D for the prevention of diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and brain dysfunction.

Based on this paper alone, we can establish the following:

1. Vitamin D is extremely safe up to doses of 4,000 IU per day
2. Vitamin D is probably safe up to doses of 10,000 IU, provided you are monitoring blood tests and keeping the blood levels within the optimal range of 50-80 ng/ml
3. 400 IU per day is likely a sufficient dose for infants
4. 600 IU is way too low for pregnant women and adults, even though the IOM suggests that it is sufficient
5. Blood testing is recommended to assure that you are within the optimal range.
6. The IOM provides no definitive evidence that higher doses of vitamin D are toxic; they are assuming toxicity based on a lack of evidence that doses higher than 4,000 IU per day are safe.

In conventional medicine, everything is compartmentalized. For example, when you walk into a cardiologist’s office, they have a tendency to view you as a heart with legs. They do not see a connection between the health of your heart and the inflammation in your joints or anywhere else in the body.

In holistic medicine, everything is viewed as connected, which means that every symptom has a message from the entire body. To a holistic practitioner, the joint inflammation may also indicate inflammation in the arteries of the heart. This is just one example of the interconnectivity of the body.

So, what message does body odor send? More importantly, how do we fix it naturally?

First, offensive body odor is not something to be ignored or brushed off as nothing more than personal hygiene neglect. One interesting hypothesis in natural medicine is that the skin is a backup detoxification organ, which is called into action when the liver and kidneys are overwhelmed. Another hypothesis may explain why offensive body odor is such a hush-hush topic in society and why you simply can’t ignore it…

People who have offensive body odor often suffer with chronic illness. It is possible that body odor is an evolutionary defense against spreading disease. Let me explain…

When an individual in the tribe is sick or riddled with disease, the evolutionary processes would want to contain the damage in both a long-term and short-term way…

For the short term, by producing body odor, the rest of the tribe will know that you are sick, which would result in a temporary social quarantine. In other words, people will avoid you. When you are no longer sick, the body odor will dissipate and people will want to be near you again.

For the long term, if you are chronically sick and thus have sustained body odor, nature will prevent you from mating and spreading your sickly genetics. In other words, the opposite sex will avoid you and you could be ousted from the tribe.

My point is, body odor is far more serious than a social roadblock. It speaks to the health of the body in a general sense.

So, what can we do about body odor?

2.      Replace good bacteria. When certain foodstuff is not fully digested, specific organisms will ferment the material into toxic substances, which can be absorbed into the blood and emitted through the skin. Good bacteria, such as those found in iFlora by Sedona Labs, will help to balance the ecology of the gut.

3.      Try cranberry concentrate. One case report, published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, found that one glass of cranberry juice per day resulted in the elimination of body odor in one individual. Make sure you choose a cranberry concentrate, such as the Cranberry Concentrate by Genesis Today, rather than a high-sugar cranberry cocktail. (Call 888-7944325 for more information on this product).

4.      Try zinc. In one study, zinc was shown to help control body odor. Try Opti-Zinc 20 mg once per day.

5.      Drink water. Water hydrates the skin and prevents pores from clogging with bacteria.

Whenever you have a symptom, such as offensive body odor, always assume that there is a particular reason for the symptom and try to get to that underlying cause. Body odor is so easily dismissed as a superficial problem. Hopefully, I have convinced you that it likely has far deeper roots within your overall health.

There are many types of neuropathies caused by many different things, diabetic neuropathy appears to be caused by chronically elevated blood sugar which results in changes to the blood vessels that feed the nerves. These negative changes appear to starve the nerve of vital oxygen and nutrients. With that said, diabetic neuropathy is likely worsened by many other nutritional factors and deficiencies. One such deficiency was recently noted in a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

In this study, researchers gave 51 diabetics who suffer with neuropathy a dose of vitamin D that equates to just over 2,000 IU daily. After three months the treatment group enjoyed significant decreases in neuropathic pain. All patients who were enrolled in the study had low blood levels of vitamin D at the start of the study and researchers noted significantly increased blood levels by study’s end. These increases in blood vitamin D correlated with decreases in nerve pain.

Comment by Dr. Ray Hinish

Vitamin D appears to play an important role in preventing nerve damage and maintaining healthy pain receptors. In addition, it is believed that adequate vitamin D levels result in improved nerve repair and growth. Over the last few years vitamin D has moved up the ranks of natural medicine to reach superstar status. This is just one more notch in the belt of vitamin D. Remember, always choose natural vitamin D3, also called cholecalciferol. I recommend NOW Vitamin D3 1,000 IU .

If you are debating whether or not to fill that prescription for a statin medication, you may want to read this article first.

I remember when I was learning to defend against a knife attack in my blackbelt class. My instructor, a former special forces soldier, looked at us with a solemn look and said, “when defending against a knife attack, the question is not whether or not you will get cut, because you are going to get cut, the question is how serious will the wound be. Your job, in defending a knife attack, is to position yourself to limit the damage when you do get cut while disarming your attacker.” That wisdom can be applied to prescription medications as well.  As with any medication, the question isn’t whether or not side effects will occur, but do the reported benefits outweigh the numerous and almost certain risks associated with the drugs? Every day, medical doctors are forced to decide whether or not the risks of a medication are outweighed by the benefits, and how to dose and treat so that the risks of side effects are lowest while disarming the disease. Not exactly as dramatic as the knife attack, however, the outcome can be just as damaging and deadly if the wrong decision is made. The question at hand is, “are the risks of statin drugs outweighed by the benefits?”

A recent study sheds more light on the potential harm of popular cholesterol medications known as statin drugs. In this study on over 2 million men and women, researchers discovered that statin drugs significantly increased the risk of these serious side effects.
1. Moderate to severe liver damage
2. Moderate to severe muscle damage
3. Cataracts
4. Kidney damage

Do the benefits outweigh the risks?

That is what the PR firms keep telling us; but is it true? After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that you would have to treat 37 women and 33 men for five years to prevent one case of heart disease. They also discovered that stains prevent esophageal cancer; but you would have to treat 1266 women and 1082 men for five years to prevent one case.

So what about the potential side effects?

Scientists use a statistical calculation called “Number Needed to Harm” (NNH) to show risk. Let’s find out how many people will be harmed by statins in a five-year period.
1. One person will develop moderate to severe muscle damage for every 259 statin users
2. One person will develop moderate to severe liver damage for every 136 statin users
3. One person will develop kidney failure for every 434 statin users
4. One person will develop cataracts for every 33 statin users

Let’s use these numbers to figure out what we can expect per 10,000 patients who use statins for 5 years.
1. 271 fewer cases of diagnosed heart disease
2. 8 fewer cases of esophageal cancer
3. 74 cases of liver damage
4. 23 cases of kidney failure
5. 39 cases of debilitating muscle damage
6. 307 cases of cataracts

Doctors accept these risks because they assume that statins actually prevent heart disease, at best, they delay it, that is, for a few people. Based on this study, this means that 9721 out of 10,000 patients would gain no benefit from taking statins for five years. That is astoundingly dismal. Perhaps we should be looking for better options…

We listened to your suggestions and worked hard into upgrading our main site illnessisoptional.com and our online store.

Among the changes you will find:

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