About 25 years ago, I developed a phrase to help my fellow medical students remember the names for all the B vitamins. I still use this to teach nutrition today: “Teddy Roosevelt Never Painted Pyramids Blue in Fancy Clothes.” It contains the first letter of all the B vitamins in numerical order. (The missing numbers are compounds researchers thought were vitamins but turned out to be non-essential.)
Antibiotics in Your Dinner?
You’re in the “meats” section of your local grocery store, doing just what modern diet advice advises. You’re looking for the leanest cut of meat you can find to feed your family for dinner.
Unfortunately, even though you are trying to do the right thing, it doesn’t matter which cut you choose. You’re still going to get an overdose of hormones and antibiotics.
Does Your Formula Contain This?
Recently, I’ve seen some new male patients who showed me the supplements they’re taking.
They include herbs and nutrients for prostate support everyone knows about, like zinc, lycopene, and saw palmetto. But most of them are missing the three ingredients that make a difference you can actually feel.
How I Get My Vitamin B12
I kept seeing the same story over and over. Almost 70 articles on the same study… and each article with nearly the same headline: “Vitamin B12 Can Prevent Alzheimer’s.”
Don’t get me wrong… it’s true, and it’s a great thing. But it’s not really news. We’ve known the benefits of B12 for years. To me, the real importance of the study is that it deals one more body blow to modern diet recommendations, which tell us that protein and fat are the enemies of good health.
More Fake Food – Don’t Fall for the Flaxseed Lie
You’ve probably heard of flaxseed as a “superfood” … a cure-all for everything from cancer to high cholesterol. Flaxseeds are put in everything from cereal and margarine to egg-replacement products today.
Yet flaxseed is not a time-tested food product. It’s not something we evolved with, so there’s no way of telling how eating it will affect humans in the long run.
Missing Link Ate Meat
Vegetarians aren’t going to like it. But the evidence is now complete. We were meat-eaters for the entire 100 percent course of human evolution going back millions of years. In fact, we ate meat even before we became human.
My Grapefruit Prescription
You may have seen this in the news, or even heard it from your doctor: Avoid eating grapefruit or drinking grapefruit juice when you’re taking certain prescription drugs. But you might want to give up those prescription drugs before you give up grapefruit.
Why I'll Never Get a Flu Shot
I’m 54 years old, and I’ve never gotten a flu shot. Here’s why. The effectiveness of the flu vaccine is exaggerated. The strains for the vaccine are selected a year in advance. That’s important for you to know because researchers guess on what strain will prevail each flu season. They have no other way of knowing. And if they guess wrong, the vaccine is useless.
Corn Syrup's New Disguise
How do you like the sound of corn sugar?
The mega-producers of this processed sweetener think you’ll like that name better than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the biggest money maker in the history of the food industry. But a less scientific name isn’t going to transform it into something you’d want to put in your body.
The Corn Refiners Association petitioned for this name change to “avoid confusion” about what HFCS is. They claim it’s “essentially the same as table sugar.”
Well, I’ll admit table sugar and HFCS have about the same number of calories, but that’s where the similarities end…
Why I Don't Use Hand Sanitizers
I went out to my favorite Thai restaurant with my friend Lisa B. the other day. Instead of washing her hands, she rubbed hand sanitizer on while we were waiting for our food. Then she handed it to me. But I told her I wasn’t touching the stuff.
The truth is, hand sanitizers don’t do what they’re intended to do…
I Won't Eat This One
I read about something really monumental today. It’s a big event but not necessarily good for your health. The first-ever genetically modified animal – salmon – is on its way to being approved for human consumption.
This genetically engineered fish will contain DNA from two other fish species and high levels of growth hormone. What happens when you eat a genetically modified animal with very high levels of growth hormone? No one knows. I have no idea what this is going to do to people’s health, or how anyone could know, because it’s never been done before. Between you and me, I get the feeling that Frankenstein’s monster has escaped from the laboratory and is running amuck in nature…
100,000 Prescription Deaths and Counting…
Last year, over half a million Americans were hurt by prescription drugs. And 100,000 of them died.
How did that happen? If some prescription drugs are that dangerous, how are they getting approved?
The answer is not simple. There are good people involved in the process. But the incentive in the system has become distorted.
Here’s how it happened…
5 Keys to Beating the Big Organic Hoax
I love shopping at the fruit and veggie stand near my house. It makes me feel good to know where my food is coming from.
I’ve gotten to know the farmer at my market personally. She’s shown me the organic seeds she plants, and has let me see the type of soil she uses. We even talk about her natural methods of keeping nutrients in the soil and deterring bugs.
And now I don’t need to go to a huge store any more to sort through all the produce stamped “organic.” I’m feeding my family better than organic…
Are You Taking the Right Vitamin E for Your Heart?
I see a lot of reports and read a lot of studies on vitamin E. You may have, too.
Like the study where researchers gave athletes only 200 mg of vitamin E for only 21 days and concluded that vitamin E has no cardiopulmonary benefit.
Or how about the group of researchers who looked at 11 high-dose vitamin E studies and concluded that the more vitamin E you take, the greater your risk of dying?
Another you may have heard of is the lung cancer study where researchers found multivitamins, vitamins C, E and folate don’t reduce lung cancer risk. But that vitamin E may increase your risk.
If you conclude from this that researchers are out to get vitamin E, I wouldn’t blame you…
They're Not Giving It To You…
I was doing research on the heart recently when I came across a report published by a cardiovascular clinic. They found that Americans are now so deficient in vitamin D we’re suffering in a way I’m not even allowed to tell you about here.1
Meanwhile, the modern health industry insists you stay out of the sun even though sunlight is nature’s way of creating vitamin D in your body. They claim modern farming is growing nutritious crops even though crops from big farms have far fewer nutrients than we used to get in our produce…
A Safer Choice Than Antihistamines
When patients in my clinic ask me how to relieve sneezing, itching, coughing and runny noses, the first thing I do is speak with them about histamines.
Let me show you why…
When your immune system thinks it’s found something that doesn’t belong, it reacts defensively. Your body starts to release chemicals, one of which is histamine. Itching, sneezing and even hives are all signs that histamines are at work…
Should You Eat the "Other White Meat"?
You may have seen pork marketed as “the other white meat.” Many cuts of modern pork are indeed quite white and getting lighter all the time. Yet the cuts of pork from the farms around where I grew up varied from pink to reddish brown.
Today’s pork is also a lot drier and less flavorful than my grandfather’s pork. The pigs are a lot different, too. Gone are the fat-laden huge hogs that weighed two thousand pounds. These days, the industry equates leaner with better. But with all this dramatic change, do we really know how healthy these new products are?
What Made the Indians Shrink
When you lived in your native environment, your body was a high-performance machine. You thrived on muscle meat, organ meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Your heart was sturdy. Your jaw was powerful. Your lungs were strong. Your brain was dynamic. And you were quick on your feet…
Unfortunately, we don’t live in our native environment any longer.
Corn and grains migrated into modern culture, and our health changed for the worse. As we replaced high-quality animal protein and fat with a low-fat, high-carb diet, we began the largest epidemic the world has ever known, which is still upon us, and getting worse every day…