If you’re gaining weight, feeling dizzy when you stand up, craving salt or not falling asleep even though you’re tired, you may be dealing with a health challenge both alternative and mainstream practitioners call “Adrenal Fatigue” (AF). You would be in good company. Although it’s impossible to know the full impact and incidence of the crisis, according to Dr. Kerry Saucer writing in the book “Exhausted & Drained? It's NOT Just in Your Brain”, estimates are that millions of Americans suffer some degree of AF.
The adrenal glands, two tiny pieces of tissue sitting atop the kidneys (renals) play an especially significant role in maintaining the movement of fluid through the circulatory system and can be thought of as a center for blood pressure monitoring and control. They accomplish this important job by constantly monitoring blood oxygen and carbon dioxide. When the former drops and the latter builds up, a hormone called “aldosterone” is secreted. In response, blood pressure (or the force of movement through the circulatory vessels) is adjusted, redirecting blood flow to the legs and arms and away from the skin, digestive and excretory systems.
Ten Bad Foods
Below are recommendations from Dr. Joel Wallach that everybody should limit or ELIMINATE from their diet.
- Wheat
- Barley
- Rye
- Buckwheat
- Oats, Oatmeal – even if it says that it’s gluten free.
- Fried Food – nothing fried! You should boil, broil or bake and never more than medium rare for red meat.
- Oils – Oils oxidize when they come into contact with the air (become rancid). Since almost all oil is continually exposed to some air from the time it is produced, the process of oxidation has begun in even the freshest oil. These oxidized oils cause inflammation and cell damage. (Youngevity's essential oils are injected into the gel caps surrounded by nitrogen to prevent oxidation.)
- Well done red meat (IE No burned fats) – (rare or medium-rare is ok!) If you grill your food, try to have something between the food and the fire (like aluminium foil) so the juice doesn’t drip onto the flame and deposit dangerous things on the meat.
- Any nitrates added to meat – (ie: deli meats) tell your butcher NO NITRATES or NITRITES!
- No carbonated drinks of any kind within one hour before, during or one hour after meals.
- Skin of a baked potato (or yam, or sweet potato). If you boil a potato, you can eat the skins.
I’ve been hearing a lot of commercials about beets lately, the latest darling of the nutritional supplement industry. Supplements using beets, particularly beet juice and beet powder, look to exploit recent research findings focused on the nutrient-dense tap root's ability to enhance athletic performance, strength and endurance.
The secret to the beet boost for athletes and workout warriors is in its nitrogen content, specifically in the form of nitrates and nitrites. Despite the conventional wisdom that these chemicals are best avoided, as it turns out the misunderstood molecules have been a valued medicinal asset for doctors and health care professionals for over a hundred years. They’re sources of nitrogen and, when transformed into the gas hormone nitric oxide (NO), they become a potent hormone-like biochemical that plays various important roles in keeping the body healthy. NO is especially important for heart health. It lowers blood pressure, supports the flow of fluid through the circulatory system, improves male sexual performance, fights cancer, destroys tumors and is anti-inflammatory. In addition to being a source of nitric oxide, nitrates may play an important role in eye health, particularly for patients dealing with glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness that affects 3 million Americans. A 1998 article published in the journal Vision concluded that the use of therapeutic nitrates in glaucoma patients may offer a protective effect. More recently, a study published in JAMA Ophthalmology found that American adults who ate the most nitrates were 21 percent less likely than those who ate the least nitrates to develop open-angle glaucoma by the time they were in their 60s and 70s.
