I get lots of letters. Mostly they’re honest questions from folks trying to resolve health issues and get back on track with taking care of their bodies, getting off prescription drugs and getting on a good nutritional supplement program. Sometimes I get positive feedback or kudos encouraging me to carry on with my efforts to wake people up to the power of nutrition. And sometimes (not too often fortunately) I get letters criticizing my work or the positions I take on health care, prescription drugs or vitamin and mineral supplementation. Yesterday, I received a note that falls into that last category from a gentleman in Texas that referenced a story that appeared in the mainstream media questioning the health benefits of anti-oxidant type supplements.
The article threw cold water on the importance of these highly regarded nutritional substances and attempted to debunk the idea that they could have beneficial effects on health on longevity. Even worse, it was headlined “We Spend Millions on Anti-oxidants, But Now Researchers Say They Make Our Bodies Age Faster” and implied that anti-oxidants may even have a harmful pro-aging effects.
Mrs. Adams looked grumpy, but who could blame her? She had just gotten out of the hospital. Her first stop after being discharged was my pharmacy and her first order of business was having a stack of prescriptions filled. Aside from the fact that Mrs. Adams was going to be parting with a significant chunk of change (she had a twenty dollar co-pay which meant her 12 prescriptions were going to costing her 240 bucks), she was also about to bombard her biology with enough chemical poisons to make her body eligible as a toxic waste dump. To compound her problems, unbeknownst to Mrs. Adams and probably her doctor too, not only were her pharmacological protocols going to be poisoning her body, but even worse, unless she was savvy enough to get on a supplement program, she was inevitably going to be dealing with the consequences of nutrient deficiency. This deficiency could conceivably lead to a whole host of pathological symptomology and might even shorten her life.
One of the more significant, if under-appreciated, aspects of prescription drug toxicity, involves the depletion of nutritional raw materials that fuel the detoxification system, the collective term for the ordinarily extremely effective purifying processes that are, for the most part, housed in the liver. That’s because these detoxifying biochemical reactions all depend on the must-have “essential” nutrients, known as the “Mighty 90”, to do their work. In fact, every chemical reaction in the body depends on these essential substances. In the presence of excessive poisons (drugs), detox “machinery” can become like a metaphorical sinkhole, diverting and draining nutritional elements and keeping them from participating in the many other biochemical reactions. They are responsible for maintaining the health and integrity of the human body.
Miki Ryosuke says that breathing can keep you skinny. In an article published in the Daily Mail, The former Japanese actor claims to have lost nearly thirty pounds in 7 weeks by practicing what he calls the “Long Breath Diet”, a system whereby practitioners inhale slowly for three seconds and exhale vigorously for seven seconds. Mr. Ryosuke claims that by practicing his Long Breath technique for two to five minutes a day, overweight and obese patients will notice rapid weight loss benefits.
Even if Ryosuke claims are exaggerated, it is not an overblown assertion that there is an important relationship between fat cells and oxygen. A relationship that may play a role in the development of obesity and the difficulty of weight loss.
Miki Ryosuke says that breathing can keep you skinny. In an article published in the Daily Mail, The former Japanese actor claims to have lost nearly thirty pounds in 7 weeks by practicing what he calls the “Long Breath Diet”, a system whereby practitioners inhale slowly for three seconds and exhale vigorously for seven seconds. Mr. Ryosuke claims that by practicing his Long Breath technique for two to five minutes a day, overweight and obese patients will notice rapid weight loss benefits.
Even if Ryosuke claims are exaggerated, it is not an overblown assertion that there is an important relationship between fat cells and oxygen. A relationship that may play a role in the development of obesity and the difficulty of weight loss.
In an article that was published in October of 2010 in the journal “Psychological Science”, collaborating researchers from Harvard and Columbia Universities found that humans and animals can up-regulate (i.e. stimulate) the production of healing chemicals by intentionally assuming open, wide, spread out expansive positions and postures. For instance, holding the shoulder up and widening the chest muscles for as little as two minutes. In that short period of time, according to the researchers, you can drop your stress hormone levels and increase testosterone and other anabolic building hormones. All this can be done just by holding the body in certain positions.
When was the last time you went to a doctor’s office for your arthritis or osteoporosis or autoimmune or degenerative disease and had him tell you to keep your shoulder wide and open up your chest? Probably never, but strategies like these that can not only improve our ability to heal in a completely non-toxic fashion, but even more importantly, they can keep us from having to interact with an intrusive and ineffective medical model that has presided over the most dramatic increase in degenerative disease in the history of man.
