October 2008
In This Issue:
Beer Belly and Love Handles Produced by Estrogen
It’s Just ‘Cause I’m Getting Older, Right? The Biggest Myth Of All
Introducing Children’s Nutrition
Beer bellies, abdominal fat, and ‘love handles’ are all produced by hormone imbalances. High insulin from carbohydrate consumption, such as beer, will elevate estrogen levels in men and women in a dangerous way. Estrogen then encourages fat storage.
We have found that the best way to get excess estrogen out of the body is to do a 21-day Cleanse. Even with a combination of diet, exercise, or supplements, doing the Cleanse is enormously more effective and much faster. The reason is this: estrogen is a very difficult hormone for the liver to break down. If your liver is working optimally (and it rarely is, considering how many toxins it deals with every day!) it removes the estrogen from the blood, converts it to a water-soluble molecule, and gets rid of it through the intestines. Since most people’s livers are not working great, the estrogen doesn’t get converted, and goes back into the body, and leads to weight gain. (An interesting fact: feedlot cattle are injected with estrogen a few weeks before slaughter to increase their weight.)
The 21-day Cleanse stimulates the liver with herbs to encourage detoxification, de-congests the liver, gives the liver nutrients to operate at peak efficiency, and includes fiber to bind the estrogen that is being removed via the intestines. Exercise and diet DO help people to lose weight, but the 21-day Cleanse helps people get their bodies working optimally.
How many times have you heard this? Or thought it yourself? You resign yourself to whatever health condition you have, or are starting to get, because, let’s face it – the TV ads make you think it’s normal, and your friends and family all seem to be suffering, too!
This is the biggest myth ever. Aging is simply the process of the body breaking down – if you want to age well, you just support the body in staying healthy. It’s simple, but not necessarily easy. For example, most Americans don’t eat well. Over time, that causes nutritional deficiencies that lead to the inability of your body to repair itself, and keep its immune system strong. Little things start to break down, and you begin to experience symptoms such as being more tired, being achy when you move, having joint pain, hair and skin getting duller, getting sick more often or more severely. And/or we then “put our back out” leaning over to tie our shoes, and can’t move, drive, or work for several days, and eventually get out of the “emergency”, shrug our shoulders and say, “It’s just because I’m getting older”. And we’ve heard people say this in their 30’s!
One of our delivery guys just walked in here 10 minutes ago, dropping something off and limping a bit because he’d put his back out 2 weeks ago.
He’s walking around with a back support belt on, and taking steroids. He’s 40, overweight, and said the same thing – decided it was because he’s got a physical job and he’s getting older. He asked for my opinion and wanted me to be straight with him, so I told him that basically he’s ignored his health and his back for 5-10 years and would he do that to a car he really valued? Would he refuse to do maintenance on it and then be surprised when it broke down? He laughed and totally got it.
Regardless of your age, you can impact that downward slide. The first step would be to look frankly at what you’re doing or not doing in your life that you KNOW is negatively impacting your health and do the opposite. You start with changing one thing – adding a walk in 2-3 times a week, or going to bed earlier, or taking a yoga class once a week, or eating broccoli twice. While this won’t turn everything around, I use the analogy of a cruise ship – I read someplace that it takes a cruise ship a mile to turn, because it’s so large and there’s so much momentum. We’re like that – we’ve had decades to get to where we are now, so it’s not going to happen overnight. BUT YOU WOULD BE STUNNED at how much better our patients start to feel when we begin to guide them on making changes. Many say that they haven’t felt that good in years, and didn’t know that they could feel that way again. It’s completely possible – don’t use aging as a cop-out.
That’s actually my life-long game – to see how healthy I can be when I’m 80. As health practitioners, we know so much, and keep learning so much, and at the age now of 41, I see how much I have avoided, and how good I feel, and I know I’m on the right track. You can start turning your cruise ship around at any time, and if you need help, let us know.
Most parents worry that their kids are not getting the correct nutrition, especially if their child is a picky eater! And while Flintstones vitamins might keep your child from getting scurvy, if you’re interested in your child having optimal health, there are some kid-friendly supplements that our littlest patients love.
A whole-food vitamin provides nutrients the way nature intended, so that your child receives many vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients, rather than isolated and synthetic ingredients. And while most children won’t eat fish, they’ll LOVE the orange-flavored fish oil in chewable caplets – it tastes like, dare we say it? Candy! Come in for a free taste-test yourself – we’ve only seen people be surprised and delighted! There’s also a whole-food supplement for supporting your child when they start to get sick, and many parents keep these chewable tablets on hand at home because they are so effective.
If you want the best for your child, and you know they’re not getting all they need from their limited diet, using whole food, chewable supplements is an easy, and hugely effective way to keep your child healthy.
