Tag Archives: holistic health care

Fish and Heart Health – a Surprising Study

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The Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study (WHI-OS), which involved 84,493 females aged 50-79 years old, analyzed data over a 10 year period on the effects of various forms of fish consumption and heart failure. At the start of this study none of the participants had heart disease.

Fish is well known as a food which enhances both physical as well as mental health. Fish oil is also reported to be a mental and physical nutrient which reduces disease development and mental deterioration. In evaluating fish and fish oil it would be natural to expect that positive outcomes would be observed and reported.

The study divided the consumption of baked or broiled fish into frequency catagories of less than 1 time per month; 1-3 times per month; 1-2 times per week; 3-4 times per week and greater than 5 times per week.

The study also observed the consumption of fried fish at the frequencies of less than one serving per month; 1-3 times per month and greater than 1 time per week.

The findings, however, were startling. The weekly consumption of 5 or more serving of baked or broiled dark fish, primarily salmon, mackerel and bluefish, was found to lower the risk of heart failure by an impressive 30%. While the consumption of fried fish, just 1 time or more per week, was associated to be related to a 48% increase in heart failure!

Another surprise within this study is that the assumption that taking omega-3 supplements will be as beneficial as eating fish. The study could not identify any significant change in cardiac failure rates that was associated with taking omega-3 supplements.

While the study came to no hard and fast conclusion of why the fried fish was so lethal, the thinking is that there must be some property to the oil when deep fried that creates the negative health affects. Another conclusion was that it appears better to eat fresh fish that is baked or broiled that to reply on fish oil supplements for heart health.

While this is a blow to those of us who love fish and chips, enjoying fish that is well cooked and healthy of our hearts is not a hard thing to get used to.

With all good wishes,
Georgianna

Copyright 2011 G. Donadio

A Holistic Approach to Fibromyalgia

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Fibromyalgia is a condition that millions of Americans suffer from. Translates from the Latin and Greek roots it means “pain in the fibrous muscle and connective tissues”.

The symptoms are usually chronic, intense pain in the tissues, which are highly sensitive to pressure. The sensitivity is often located throughout the body and can move and shift without any seeming rhyme or reason.

Fibromyalgia can be also accompanied with a host of other symptoms such as joint pain and difficulty with movement, fatigue and exhaustion, difficulty sleeping or getting restful sleep as well as headaches and other symptoms.

What can be frustrating for sufferers is that even after many decades of clinical research on fibromyalgia, medical experts refer to this condition as a “medically unexplained syndrome”.  

The condition is clinically defined as a history of widespread pain in the connective tissues that persist for more over 12 weeks, and which affects both sides of the body and includes above and below the waist.

The prevailing medical course of treatments offered include muscle relaxants, anti-depressants and even anti-seizure medication. The onjective of prescribing these drugs are to affect the nervous system function to reduce pain. Unfortunately, one of the side affects of these medication is that they can also produce lethargy and fatigue, creating a “dog chasing tail scenario” for the sufferer. They take medication to feet better

Holistic treatment plans have been shown to be very effective in alleviating both the pain and other realted fibromyalgia symptoms. Holistic and alternative medicine approaches incorporate medication, patient education, aerobic exercise and cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Here is how connective tissue and muscle fibers function in both normal conditions as well as in  fibromyalgia states:

For muscle movement energy is produced in each muscle cell which in turn allows the muscle fiber bundles to move. When energy is produced through the Krebs Cycle inside each cell, crystal like acids are produced as a result of this energy production.

Lactic and pyruvic acids can build up in the spaces between the muscle fibers if there is a lack of proper blood flow or if the muscles are so tensed that these by-products cannot be removed with normal circulatory function.

The more tense the muscle, the more diminished the circulation, the greater the tissue build up of these highly irritating acids. Over time, the surrounding tissues become highly inflamed and a chronic, painful syndrome is established.

Fibromyalgia is a stress-fueled condition. All options related to reducing stress and muscle tension, along with increasing circulation and relaxation are highly effective.

With all good wishes,
Georgianna

Copyright 2011 G. Donadio

A Stimulating Look at Energy Drinks

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They are the new retail craze, available everywhere and promising instant  energy to get more done faster. The largest population they are pitched to is the “under 30” group. This includes high school and college students, as well as athletes both school age and professional.

Our over worked culture is moving beyond coffee for its morning wake up and afternoon pick–me-up to the energy drink solution. This popular product comes with it’s own health concerns. Energy drinks contain significant amounts of caffeine and sugar and can include other stimulants such as ephedrine, guarana, and ginseng, which all have been shown to have potential health concerns. Here are some points of consideration you may want to be aware of before gulping down a can or two of the elixir:

  • Energy drinks contain as much caffeine as in a cup of coffee. Consumed quickly as energy drinks are, the caffeine and sugar provide a jolt of energy by stimulating your stress system, but also raise your blood sugar and blood pressure levels, causing your heart to beat faster and work harder.
  • The contents of these energy drinks can produce symptoms that may include anxiety, insomnia, irritability and nausea that can be severe enough to require medical attention or hospitalization.
  • Energy drinks, if taken during exercise, can dehydrate the body and deplete much needed calcium and potassium.
  • Because of the energy provided by the caffeine and sugar in energy drinks, they have become popular as mixers with alcohol. This can lead to an individual not being aware of the level of intoxication, which might allow them to drive under the influence.
  • Bad reactions to energy drinks have been reported to U.S. poison control centers published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
  • In a report of nine cases of adverse reactions to the energy drink Redline, the patients reported nausea and vomiting, high blood pressure, tremors, dizziness and numbness.
  • There is the impression that because these drinks are available over the counter and can be bought in any retail store, they are not a “substance” that we should use carefully.
  • While energy drinks can be part of a balanced lifestyle when consumed sensibly, as with all things related to health and lifestyle, we need to exercise moderation and good judgement to avoid problems that can arise from inappropriate or excessive use.

With all good wishes,
Georgianna

Copyright 2010 G. Donadio

Cold and Flu Season – Medicine Recalls

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Over the past year, millions of cold and flu medicines have been recalled owing to safety problems. These concerns included bottles that were contaminated with bacteria and processing debris, such as small amounts of metal.

Some of the medications involved include varieties of Tylenol, Motrin, Benadryl and Zyrtec. They are not expected to back in the stores again until 2012. The initial recalls were announced by McNeil Consumer Health Care, which is a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson Company.

This recall may be a perfect time for concerned parents to turn to non-drug alternatives for their children’s as well as their own cold and flu care this season. Popular examples of natural treatments for cold and flu include the use of  Vick’s Vapo-rub on congested lungs and stuffy noses, as well as saline drops in the nose, garlic and mulleinoil for ear infections and hot steamy showers to break up congestion and improve breathing.

According to traditional peditaricians, a child needs to have a 101 degree temperature before the medicine is going to work. A while many doctors agree that these medications do not necessarily help you get better, they also agree that it helps parents to feel as if they are “doing” something to help their child or themselves. Unfortunately, sometimes these drugs can slow down healing rather than help.

The body creates a temperature to destroy the bacteria that is in the body. By allowing a temperature to run its course, you allow your body to naturally heal and also create greater immunity to bacteria and viruses.

The best way to deal with avoiding colds and flu is staying well. The best way to stay well is to practice good health habits.Eating well, getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, drinking lots of fluids, reducing stress and, of course, washing your hands regularly before eating are all recommended ways to stay well and avoid the need for over the counter drugs.

With all good wishes,
Georgianna

Copyright 2010 G. Donadio

Holistic Health Benefits of Oregano

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Oregano is an aromatic herb that belongs to the mint family that is cultivated around the world. Its leaves and oils are medicinally used. Origanum Marjoram is the common oregano used for cooking. Origanum Vulgare is the wild oregano used for making oregano oil, which contain two powerful compounds that provide health benefits: carvacrol and thymol.

Studies have demonstrated that these two compounds have a significant systemic effect on keeping the body healthy via inhibiting the growth of bacteria, virus and fungi, which are the precipitating factors in most chronic diseases and illnesses.

Health Benefits of Oregano Oil:

  • Antiviral and antibacterial properties help destroy organisms that contribute to infections.
  • Antiparisitic properties are helpful in digestive problems.
  • Strengthens the immune system by eliminating microbes.
  • Oregano oil is an excellent chronic bladder infection remedy.
  • Increase joint and muscles flexibility by eliminating inflammation.
  • Improves chronic respiratory conditions.
  • Applied topically, it can help treat skin infections, itchy skin and irritated gums.
  • Thymol and carvacrol help calm stomachs upsets and aids digestion.
  • Antioxidant properties in oregano oil exceeds apples and blueberries.

Cautions:

  • Pregnant women are advised not to take Oil of Oregano regularly as the oil when used regularily may reduce the ability to absorb iron.
  • Oregano oil comes from the same family as thyme, basil, sage and mint, so fi you have allergies to those, you may also react to oregano.
  • When taking oregano oil internally, use a diluted dose as the highly concentrated oil may be harmful to your organs.
  • Oil of oregano, topically may be moderately irritating to skin and can cause in some cases mucous membrane irritant. The oil should not be applied topically to mucous membranes in greater than a 1% concentration solution. In addition, children under the age of two years old as well as people with damaged or very sensitive skin should not use the oil topically.

This powerfully healing plant, as with so many herbs, whem used appropriately can bring rapid healing changes to even the most chronic conditions.

With all good wishes,
Georgianna
Copyright 2010 GDonadio

De-Toxify Your Environment – Purify Your Body

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We are bombarded everyday with hundreds of chemical toxins in our environment. Plastic particles, heavy metals, pesticides, cleaning toxins, air pollution and hundreds of other chemicals find their way into our lungs, blood stream, immune system and body systems.

Here are some easy tips to de-toxfy your environment and purify your body, preventing illness and even early aging.

> Protect your boy from pesticides by thoroughly washing your fruits and vegetables to remove most of the pesticide residue.
If you can find, grow or afford organic produce, this is your best assurance against ingesting unwanted pesticides

> Use cotton, polyester or hemp over plastic bathroom shower and window curtains. Plastic emits toxic chemicals easily eliminated by using alternative materials

> Don’t inhale gas fumes when you are filling your tank and avoid exhaust fumes when jogging or walking in a heavily trafficked area. Gasoline contains lead and other pollutants and should not be inhaled

> Use only natural body creams or replace them with olive or walnut oil. The chemicals found in body creams and lotions as well as make up and other beauty products can be carcinogenic and should be avoided.

> Avoid all secondhand and third hand smoke. Exposure to second or third hand smoke kills over 50,000 people every year.

> Keep over the counter pill use to a minimum. Studies show a direct correlation between high over the counter drug use and liver and brain damage, as well as an increase of Alzheimer’s disease.

> Wipe your feet or take your shoes of before coming into your house.This will reduce the amount of lead dust and allergens you can bring ino the house from your shoes.

> Lather up – using soap liberally when you are showering or bathing is the best and most natural way to eliminate environment toxins from your skin, which is the largest immune component of your body, and also the part of the body most in contact with the external environment.

> Eat low mercury fish – by eating cod, flounder, wild Alaskan or Pacific salmon, as well as clams and shrimp, you can avoid mercury rich foods. Swordfish, mackerel and tuna fish all have higher levels of mercury that the white fish mentioned.

> Replace highlychemical house cleaners with the now popular green cleaners that do not irritate the lungs or skin.

By following these simple tips, you can save your liver and immune system the work of detoxifying these chemicals out of your body. This will,, over time, prove to e a “life saver” – literally!

With all good wishes
Georgianna

Copyright 2010 – G. Donadio

Eating Less = Living Longer Part IV

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Over the past few years, the National Institutes of Health spent 30 million dollars on a multiple study site program that has been called CALERIE – which stands for Comprehensive Assessment of the Long Terms Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy. What this translates into is “calorie-restricted diet”.

All across the U.S. there are 132 study subjects who have spent the past few years maintaining a calorie-reduced lifestyle. As we discussed in previous blogs, these studies are the outgrowth of rhesus money studies that showed a significant reduction in disease manifestation and aging. The desire to duplicate these findings in humans and see if this “new” approach to disease prevention and longevity would prove as successful in humans as it did in animals.

The results of the first phase of the study outcomes provide us a look into what can be expected by the end of the study. With just a 25% calorie reduction over the course of a 6 month period, the study participants metabolism became more efficient and their insulin sensitivity rose which meant that their body was able to deal with the regulation of blood sugar more effectively which is a critical function in the prevention of diabetes. Other outcomes suggest the diet’s ability to lower hypertension and cholesterol levels as well as improve memory function.

Even the medical researchers who worked on the first phase of the study have been skeptical. John Holloszy, MD from Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, says” I didn’t think this would work in humans until I started working with people who had been doing it for years. They are among the healthiest people I’ve ever known.”

It makes perfect common sense that when you reduce the wear and tear on any machine, you have a more efficient function and create a longer life span for that functioning mechanism. It should not surprise any of us that when we take digestive and metabolic stress off our organs we feel better, look better and ARE better!

What benefits might you derive from such an approach to your nutrition? Reducing our food intake by 25% means that we take 1/4 of the food we have on our plate and just don’t eat it – easy enough. But it also means that you begin to substitute more nutritous food for less nutritous food over the long term, which will lead to better health and longer life.

More importantly, however, what this lifestyle can do for each of us is place the control over our health and wellness back where it belongs – into our own hands (and mouths).

With all good wishes,
Georgianna

Copyright 2010 – G. Donadio

The Courage to Love

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We all know that love – unconditional acceptance by another person – is what we want, need and desire.  Love is vital to our health and well being and is one of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.  And yet, loving another is a complicated thing, which requires both courage and resilience to transverse the landscape of such profound emotion.

It is evidenced that many individuals after more than a year of unresolved grief, develop cancer or fatal heart disease. The loss of love can be so profound that indeed, it can, break our hearts and our will to live. The renowned psychiatrist Sigmund Freud stated that we “are never so hopelessly unhappy as when we lose love.”

In a poignant essay,  published in The Sun, Poe Ballantine provides insight to the necessity of trust within love. Trust is the element of love which provides the safe place necessary to share our lives and hearts with others. Trusting, and dealing with the loss of trust within love, requires great courage to be able to move beyond the loss and love again. It is interesting that we are inundated from many sources these days with information about wellness and how to prevent illness, when what many of us need is information about how to prevent heartbreak.

Ballantine’s essay tells a story about his father:

“He kept a close ritual of coffee, then work, dinner, his television shows and his cigarettes. The newspaper stayed on the table open to the personals. He had opened them the first day she had left him, like the reflex of a man covering a wound after being shot. His face was gray from survival. He was a man who could not allow himself to break. The despair stretched out. The music from the stereo could not fill the emptiness. Our conversations were automatic, clock talk. His single guiding hope was that she would return.”

“What had happened to my father he never believes would happen. He was fifty years old, settled, comfortable, secure. His children were raised. He had worked hard all his life and now he could relax. I understood why my mother had left him, but I still condemed her for leaving – for taking the easy way out. My father and I played cards and watched private-eye dramas on television. He looked in the personals, called once at something that looked right, but cancelled soon after; it just wasn’t in him.”

“One Sunday afternoon I heard him crying in the bedroom. I didn’t know what to do with a father who cried. He taught me all I knew, the important things: honesty, loyalty, firm handshake, the love beyond self-love, the duty of a man. Trust was his only religion and it was failing him and in turn it was the failure of the world.”

“The one thing a human being asks for on this earth is to be loved. Why should it be impossible?”

Trusting, loving and the resilience to come back from the loss of love may be the next “health frontier”.  Nutrition, one of the more popular health topics, is not just about nourishing our tissues. Nourishing our hearts, which are hungry for love and acceptance, is another skill we need to learn. If we should be mindful of what we eat, how mindful should we become about how and who we love?

With all good wishes,
Georgianna

Copyright 2010 G. Donadio

Calcium and Weight Loss

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Information from the Nutrition Institute of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, appears to confirm the “rumor” that calcium rich diets result in lower body fat.

According to a recent study in mice conducted at the University, a diet that includes low-fat dairy products and calcium supplementation can result in significant weight loss through the burning rather than the storing of fat in fat cells. This is explained as being the results of the role that stored calcium plays in the breakdown and burning of fat inside our body’s cells.

Here is an excerpt from an article on the study, published on WedMD written by Jeanie Larche Davis:

“The researchers used mice bred to be obese in their current study. The mice were fed a special high-fat, high-sugar diet for six weeks. All had a 27% increase in body fat.

Some were then switched to a calorie-restricted diet. Of those, one group was given calcium supplements (calcium carbonate similar to Tums) and others were fed “medium” and “high” amounts of low-fat dry milk.

Body fat storage was markedly reduced by all three high-calcium diets, say the authors.
Those given calcium supplements had good results, when combined with the restricted-calorie diet.

Mice getting their calcium via supplements had a 42% decrease in body fat, whereas mice eating without supplements had an 8% body fat loss.”

The reason this was of great interest to me and it felt important to share is because I have observed over the past 10 years, that during any period of time that I have consistently taken calcium supplementation, in the form of powdered calcium/magnesium, my body weight has definitely decreased.

Within a month or so of not taking the calcium/magnesium powder, the weight starts to creep back on. This article helps to answer the question of why. Thyroxine, secreted by the thyroid, is a critical hormone in intracellular metabolism. Thyroxine also has a significant impact on intracellular metabolism and on the utilization of calcium.

Having a calcium rich diet would allow the thyroxin that is necessary for cellular metabolism to be more effecient in utilizing the fat stored in our cells for energy!

This article has been very clarifying and explains WHY high calcium diets facilitate weight loss. Armed with that information we can enjoy eating our spinach, kale and sardines knowing they are working away to keep our body fat burning.

With all good wishes,
G
© by NIWH 2010 all rights reserved

Autism and the Amish

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An important health article was sent to me yesterday and even though this week’s blog has been about the endocrine glands, this information felt compelling enough that it should be shared with you while it’s fresh. The following quoted information regarding the Amish and Autism was provided by Thomas Corriher who hosts The Health Wyze Report, an Internet radio program. Please note: I have made editorial changes indicated with [ ] to keep the tone of the piece as non-political as possible.

“People outside the alternative health community are often confused by the lack of autism in the Amish people. The Amish do not experience autism, or any of the other learning disabilities that plague our technological society. The Amish live in a society that consists of outdated technologies and ideals, by contemporary standards. Their diet consists of eating organic, fresh, locally-grown produce, and they do not follow the established vaccination routines.

This has resulted in a healthier people who are void of our [most common]chronic diseases. Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are virtually non-existent in Amish villages. Equally non-existent are modern, chemically-engineered medicines, chemically-engineered foods, G.M.O. foods, and of course, vaccines. How is it that those who are without modern orthodox medicine are healthier? The truth about health, medicine, and how they both relate to the Amish is becoming [ever more important].

There have been 3 verified cases of autism in the Amish, and at least two of those children were vaccinated. No information is available for the third. The strong correlation between vaccinations and autism [appears] undeniable, unless you work for [vaccine vested interests]. Proponents [of vaccination] claim that the Amish have a special super gene that makes them immune to autism.”

The subject of autism and vaccination is highly controversial and there are many families (you may belong to one of them) who are trying to sort out the facts in order to make the important decision of whether or not to vaccinate or how much and how many vaccines to allow.

I would like to offer, if this is a concern for your family, that you may want to explore this subject of autism in the Amish, as well as autism in those who live within specific communities which follow an organic, natural lifestyle and do not use synthetically produced medications as part of their health care. This information may possibly assist you in making a more informed decision regarding this important matter.

With all good wishes,
G
© by NIWH 2010 all rights reserved