Simple fasting can reduce chemotherapy effects

It is one of the basic tenets of naturopathy that regular fasting will aid your body’s own natural defence systems to be activated as it is cleansed of toxins. It usually involves eating no solid food and drinking only water for periods from a day to a week or longer, but only under supervision, though some fasts may involve eating just fruit – usually grapes.

Researchers at the University of Southern California have just discovered a new benefit of fasting that is of huge interest to anyone undergoing chemotherapy. Whilst undertaking anti-ageing research they discovered that certain stressors activate a protective “shield mode” in healthy cells.

What stresses the body most? Certainly being starved is one of the major ones and what the US researchers are suggesting is that if cancer patients fast for two days before chemotherapy that may set in motion a protective reaction in healthy cells, guarding them from some of the more unpleasant and toxic side effects. Cancer patients are often given drugs like Procrit to prevent such side effects so this more natural method would certainly be worth trying.

Also, although it is not ‘news’ as such, it might be worth reminding you that homeopathy also has a lot to offer here. Radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments for cancer can have significant side effects and homoeopathy has been shown to be useful in terms of emotional support, reduction of anxiety and depression and in the treatment of the side effects from chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery.

Remedies for various treatments for cancer can be obtained from a homoepathic practitioner or by mail order from Ainsworth’s in Wigmore Street in London or from Galen, a practice I use in Dorchester, who make their own tablets and have a good free advice service. If you want to contact them ring 01305 263996.

Always tired? Check your thyroid

We all get tired from time to time, but if you feel your energy levels are on a permanent low and you tend to nod off the minute you are sitting quietly without doing anything then you might have a thyroid malfunction. Your head is a very sensitive indicator of thyroid hormone status so if it feels heavy or tired, especially in the afternoon that might alert you to a potential problem here. Apart from the symptoms above, you may also notice forgetfulness, depression, constipation, changes in weight and appetite, greater sensitivity to cold, dry, rough or scaly skin, dry, tangled hair and hair loss, particularly from the outer part of your eyebrows, and brittle nails.

The thyroid is a small, butterfly-shaped, gland that produces the hormones that influence virtually every organ, tissue and cell in your body. Your doctor can carry out a simple test to see if your thyroid isn’t working properly, but they often prescribe the use of synthetic thyroid hormone. If you think you might be at risk, it could be worth trying some alternative methods first to see if they make a difference.

Natural Methods to Restore Your Thyroid:
As usual, it starts with a healthy diet, and you need to ensure you have adequate amounts of iodine and selenium, which provide the raw materials for your thyroid gland to work better. Natural food sources of iodine include cod, tinned tuna in oil, milk, eggs, baked potatoes (eat the skin) and turkey breast.

Selenium can be found in many of our foodstuffs including garlic, broccoli, onions, walnuts, brazil nuts, salmon, halibut, brown rice, chicken breast meat, wholemeal bread, and milk.

The next key element is to include plenty of omega-3 fats not least because the human brain is more than 60% structural fat, just as your muscles are made of protein and your bones are made of calcium. But it’s not just any fat that our brains are made of, and unfortunately we tend to eat far more of the man-made trans- fats and excessive amounts of saturated fats and vegetable oils high in Omega-6 fatty acids, all of which interfere which our body’s attempt to utilize the tiny amount of Omega-3 fats that it gets. This is particularly important for children as if they do not have sufficient Omega-3 essential fatty acids they are significantly more likely to be hyperactive, have learning disorders, and to display behavioural problems.

So what should you be eating to get good levels of omega-3? Not dissimilar to some of the good iodine sources, you need flax seed oil and walnuts, then organic meat, fish, olive oil, fruits and green leafy vegetables.

Finally, get sufficient sleep, and in a completely dark bedroom, and tackle any stress in your life. The vast majority of people’s thyroid glands become impaired as a result of weak adrenal glands, due particularly to emotional stress, and the thyroid gland tries to compensate for this and eventually just gives up and stops working.

Was this natural sweetener ‘Miracle Berry’ nobbled?

Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I am not a fan of artificial sweeteners. Partly on taste grounds, and mostly on well-established health risks but the belief has always been that there wasn’t anything better. It was Tom Mangold, speaking on Radio 4, who alerted me to the fact that actually there was, so in case you didn’t catch the programme here’s the gist of it.

In the 1970′s, Robert Harvey, an American entrepreneur,c arrying out research in his New England laboratory when he came across a plant called Synsepalum dulcificum. This is a wild, small, red, berry grown in West Africa, which, when chewed lilterally turns sour food and drink sweet. Finally, here was something that had the potential to be a safe, non-fattening sugar substitute and an alternative to what were then the new-to-the-market artificial, chemical, sweeteners. In early trials it received a warm reception among diabetics who were able to enjoy sweet flavours without worrying about their sugar intake and from dieters anxious to avoid high-calorie desserts.

Although the berry itself is not sweet, it contains an active glycoprotein molecule, with some trailing carbohydrate chains, called miraculin. When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue’s taste buds, causing changes to how they taste – in particular bitter and sour foods like lemons and limes will taste sweet after chewing a berry and this effect lasts up to two hours.

Harvey and his colleagues were able to process the berry’s ‘miracle’ ingredient to make it marketable and they devised a test. They coated some sugarless ice lollies with the berry process and mixed them up with ordinary, sugared lollies and gave them out in a Boston playground. The result was that all the kids preferred the Miracle Berry lollies to the sugared ones, showing that the berry is a taste enhancer and, with no sugar present, the lollies didn’t rot the teeth and contained no calories. “It was junk food without the junk,” as Harvey said, and he realised he was sitting on a billion dollar project that could have had profound implications for the epidemic of obesity in the US, and the developed Western world.

He got huge backing including Barclays Bank and the Prudential and soon had hundreds of thousands of miracle berry plants growing in Jamaica. The American Federal Drugs Administration seemed to be ok with the product and then in 1973 his offices were burgled and the data files ransacked. It was clearly a case of professional ‘industrial espionage’ and was followed in 1974, on the eve of the product launch, by another body blow. The FDA, which had previously indicated it would clear the product for use, now reclassified the berry as an additive, and like any artificial ingredient, it would now have to submit to years of testing for safety and efficacy. They immediately ordered all Miracle Berry products to be withdrawn at once.

Conspiracy theorists may conclude that there was a lot at stake for the fledgling artificial sweetener industry and too much money at stake to risk an all-natural product taking over a billion dollar market. We will never know, but if you want to try it for yourself the berries are available to buy on the internet and even on ebay. There is also an informative UK website, www.miraclefruit.co.uk who have been overwhelmed with orders since the programme went out – so finally the berry’s time may have come. It has already done so in Japan where it is being sold in tablet form to aid dieters.

Cancer survival – Surprising findings

It has just been reported in the May issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology that a study done in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has shown – perhaps surprisingly – that many cancer survivors don’t follow healthy lifestyles.

Apparently they are more likely to be non-smokers (82.6% to 91.6%) than adults in the general population (79.5%) which with the worldwide smoking ban is not so surprising, but the fact that they are not more prone to exercise to recommended levels, or to have a healthy diets with the recommended ‘five a day’ of fruit and vegetables, certainly is.

In a study of more than 9,000 patients with a history of various cancers, it was seen that a staggering 80.9% to 85.2% were not following the healthy eating guidelines. This is despite evidence that shows that those patients with a history of cancer had a significantly improved quality of life if they followed the three golden rules of survival: exercise, no smoking and plenty of fruit and vegetables. In fact, only about one in 20 of all the patients were following all three recommendations, so if you have a cancer survivor in your family make it a point to see they understand how important a healthy diet is to live a longer, and better lifespan.

Cancer update on apricots

One of the many natural supplements that keeps resurfacing in connection with cancer treatment, and prevention, is apricot kernels. I recently met a lady who has had cancer who has been taking them for some time and is convinced they have helped her. The evidence on this is not cut and dried, but there is certainly a body of anecdotal evidence and some clinical trials that seems to support this view, but there are also very clear dangers in this somewhat innocuous fruit.

It has been suggested that eating 7-10 Apricot Kernels a day may help to prevent cancer, alongside a healthy lifestyle and a good diet though this is outside the limit recommended as safe by many authorities. Certainly apricots themselves have been held up as the substance that helped the Hunza to achieve their very long life span, and relative freedom from cancer. Apricot Kernels are especially rich in Vitamin B17, which is also known rather confusingly by three different names: Amygdaline, Amygdalin or Laetrile. It is B17 that is the substance that is believed to both help prevent cancer, and have a direct impact upon cancer cells and many of the best sources we simply do not eat. For instance, we core our apples, and peel our parsnips and usually give the compost heap the B17 we need for ourselves. The best source is in apricot kernels and the lady I referred to at the beginning of this piece tells me she buys the ground kernels from Dayspring on 01483 418258. They also have a website at www.anticancerinfo.co.uk/suppliers.htm for more information.

The kernels should be chewed, or ground and sprinkled on food or in fruit juice. An excellent way to take Apricot Kernels is to fill a jar half full, add a 1/4 of a jar of organic or Manuka honey and mixed well with a fork, and keep in a fridge or cool cupboard. The kernels can then be added to fruit and muesli or simply taken straight from the spoon. For anyone who is not ill but wants to guard themselves from cancer they should just take a small amount – say a small half teaspoon of the ground kernels, but for more treatment levels up to three full teaspoons is usual, but I strongly suggest you consult with a qualified natural practitioner before you begin on a regime such as this.

Food Sources:
There are many foods that contain Vitamin B17 in varying amounts and these include: apple seeds, alfalfa sprouts, apricot kernels, bamboo shoots, barley, beet tops, bitter almond, blackberries, boysenberries, brewer’s yeast, brown rice, buckwheat, cashews, cherry kernels, cranberries, currants, fava beans, flax seeds, garbanzo beans, gooseberries, huckleberries, lentils, lima beans, linseed meat, loganberries, macadamia nuts, millet, millet seed, peach kernels, pecans, plum kernels, quince, raspberries, sorghum cane syrup, spinach, sprouts (alfalfa, lentil, mung bean, buckwheat, garbanzo), strawberries, walnuts, watercress, yams.

WARNING!
I would not be responsible if I didn’t repeat that you need to use apricot kernels with caution. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment suggests that you eat no more than one or two apricot kernels a day. This is because they have a high natural level of amygdalin and, during digestion, highly toxic hydrocyanic acid is released from it. This can lead to symptoms of acute poisoning like cramp, vomiting and respiratory distress. At high doses it can even lead to a fatal respiratory paralysis, which can lead to severe, acute poisoning. At very high doses it can even prove fatal.

Frog skin and lizard spit?

No it’s not an attempt to take you into Shakespearean realms with the Witches in Macbeth, but what is actually being touted as the latest treatment for diabetes. There is a growth market in diabetes because it has reached epidemic proportions, and the buzz word in all product areas at the moment is ‘natural’ but in this instance, happily for the frogs, the scientists have yet again identified an active natural ingredient and then set to and produced a synthetic version. No problem for that on the frog front, but this is exactly what happened with white willow bark whose active ingredient is salicylic acid and together with all its other component parts helps cure headaches. Science isolated the salicylic acid and gave us aspirin, but without the natural buffering ingredients that ensured that it didn’t upset the stomach.

So what’s so special about frog skin? Researchers found that a substance, called pseudin 2, secreted in the skin of the South American shrinking frog stimulates the release of insulin in the body. From there, they created a pseudo-pseudin that they claim has the same benefits and no side effects. The researchers also claim that the synthetic version of pseudin is actually better than the natural version.  Well that’s what they said about aspirin, and if this goes on that poor shrinking frog is going to shrink out of existence as they keep using it for research.

Type 2 diabetes can be handled through managing diet and lifestyle, unless you really want to kiss a frog or deprive it of its skin?

The key factors in keeping your kidneys healthy

As we get older, it is vital to keep your kidneys functioning at their optimum best and there are two very simple ways to do that which I will explain shortly.

First do you recognise the amazing job your kidneys do for you? Each one is not much bigger than a pack of playing cards and weighs only 4-5 ounces and yet they handle nearly 25 percent of the total amount of blood that your heart pumps while you’re resting and they consume the same amount of your body’s supply of oxygen. They need all that blood and oxygen because they have five critical functions to perform for you:

1. Keeping your blood clean by filtering it of waste products and eliminating these waste products from your body as urine.

2. Helping maintain your body’s fluid composition.

3. Stimulating the production of red blood cells in your bone marrow by secreting a hormone called erythropoietin.

4. Helping maintain your blood pressure by producing an enzyme called rennin

5. Convert vitamin D to its most active form for use by the body.

One of the most vital functions your kidneys carry out for you is in the process of creating urine through an incredibly complex filtering system and tip number one is to make it easier for it to do that by drinking plain water when you are thirsty. Small amounts drunk regularly is better than a large amount in a short period of time.

Those two tips for keeping our kidneys health as we age?

The first is to not eat too much protein as it leads to greater workload on your kidneys, which must filter a by-product of protein metabolism called blood urea nitrogen (BUN) out of your blood. How much is too much? Well, if you have healthy kidneys, you can safely eat up to half of your body weight (in pounds) in grams per day. For example, if you weigh 150 pounds and are in good health, you can safely eat up to 75 grams of protein from minimally processed foods per day. If you have problems with your kidneys, you should certainly decrease this amount to reduce the strain on your system. If you are not sure, then ask your doctor to monitor you as there are tests you can take to determine how well your kidneys are processing protein.

The second is not to take Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin on a regular or frequent basis as they are known to cause kidney damage and disease. Such over-the-counter pain medications probably don’t pose significant danger if your kidneys are relatively healthy and you use them for emergencies only, so we are back to my cold again – thank goodness I don’t get more than 2 or 3 a year!

In the USA, one in nine adults has kidney disease and the best advice as ever is to be preventive and proactive. The same old boring, essential, stuff about a healthy non-processed diet, plenty of rest, exercise and freedom from stress. Take your body on holiday every day and get out into the fresh air – your body, including your kidneys, will thank you for it.

Avoiding lung cancer – Go with green

It is one of the most common and deadly chronic diseases that afflicts both men and women, and you don’t have to be – or have been – a smoker to contract it. Women in particular are more susceptible to lung cancer than men. In fact, about 80 percent of non-smokers who develop lung cancer are women and it is responsible for more deaths than ovarian, breast, and uterine cancers combined.

One simple, natural, everyday habit that can help you avoid it is to think green. We have seen how you need your greens for magnesium, but there is one green vegetable that stands leaf and root above the others for its potent combination of antioxidants and flavonoids.

Leafy greens such as spinach, cabbage, and kale, are all excellent but the king of them all turns out to be not some exotic hard-to-get item but your ordinary lettuce. At least it is according to a study done by researchers at Spain’s Galician Public Foundation for Health Emergencies who examined the correlation between fruit and vegetable intake and lung cancer risk. Of the 600 subjects, nearly half were lung cancer patients, and the rest were cancer-free and all from the same area in Northern Spain. At the conclusion of the trial an analysis of each subject’s dietary intake revealed no link between fruit intake and a reduced risk of lung cancer BUT those who ate at least one serving per day of leafy green vegetables – particularly lettuce – had half the risk of lung cancer compared to subjects who only ate these types of vegetables a few times each week. Other ‘highly commended’ foods for avoiding lung cancer were also noted to be tomatoes, green beans, potatoes, and turnip tops. These vegetables have this protective effect because they are abundant in vitamin A, so all round it looks like a daily salad has even more going for it – just keep the dressing a simple one of olive oil and lemon juice and you max the health benefits even more.

If you are concerned you might be vulnerable to lung cancer, these are the primary warning signs:

- A cough that changes character (such as severity or frequency)
- Coughing that wakes you up at night
- Shortness of breath
- Blood in sputum

The Diced Diet

With the sun shining, and prospect of swimsuits by the sea beckoning, it might be time to think about a detox diet to get you in shape. There are plenty of versions on the market, but not many that are 100% natural and that you don’t buy in a can or a box but create yourself in your own kitchen.

Basil Shackletona South African rancher, devised something called the Grape Cure and is a big fan of raw foods, which many find to be very beneficial in healing a number of conditions. He claims the diet has great cleansing properties, and, if eaten regularly as a main meal during the day, will actually detox you and if you eat it five days a week it can cure rheumatism and skin rashes, and it is a guaranteed cure for normal constipation. That last one is clear when you read the ingredients list for one meal:

Ingredients:
· 2 ounces of well-washed raisins
· 1 medium eating apple
· 1 ripe and well-washed tomato
· 2 ounces mild milk cheese such as Gouda
· 2 ounces dry-roasted peanuts (no oils, fats, or salt)
· The juice of half a fresh, ripe lemon

Obviously organic is preferred, and if you want to try it then you start by washing the raisins several times in hot water, put them in a cup and allow to soak in really hot water for about ten minutes. Squeeze the juice of the lemon into another cup and add the drained raisins so that the juice just covers the raisins and leave for up to 20 minutes – the longer you leave it the sweeter the end result will be.

In the meantime, wash the tomato, cut into small pieces, and place in a bowl. Cut the cheese into small pieces add it to the tomato and tip in the peanuts. Finally add the raisins and lemon juice to the bowl, stir thoroughly and the meal is ready to eat. To gain the best benefit, you must eat it within 15 minutes of it being ready or the ingredients lose their natural vitamins and minerals through the being exposed to the air.

Eat slowly, chew it well, and don’t drink any liquids until two hours after the meal. For maximum health benefit, if you are trying this for a week as a detox, cut meat out for that time as well.

Lower your risk of gallstones

There is a simple way to do it – just make sure your diet contains plenty of the mineral magnesium. According to a new study, a diet rich in magnesium can reduce the risk of developing this very painful condition.

Researchers studied data of more than 42,000 men from ages 40 to 75 and found that those with the highest magnesium intake decreased their risk of gallstones by as much as 33 percent. Magnesium helps to keep down triglyceride levels and raise the levels of HDL (the ‘good’ cholesterol)in the blood. Cholesterol is a major component in the formation of gallstones, in fact some gallstones are made up entirely of cholesterol,so it makes sense that higher magnesium levels will help to stop the gallstones from forming in the first place.

Magnesium is the fourth most abundant vitamin in the body, with 40 percent of it being found in our bones. It has plenty of other health benefits too and is needed for more than 300 biochemical reactions in the body. It helps maintain normal muscle and nerve function, keeps your heart rhythm steady, supports a healthy immune system, and keeps bones strong. Magnesium also helps regulate blood sugar levels, promotes normal blood pressure, and is known to be involved in energy metabolism and protein synthesis. Research is also now focusing its role in preventing and managing disorders such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.

What foods provide magnesium? Green vegetables such as spinach and broccoli are good sources of magnesium because the centre of the chlorophyll molecule (which gives green vegetables their colour) contains magnesium. Beans and peas, nuts and pumpkin seeds, and whole, unrefined grains are also good sources as is halibut and, strangely enough, peppermint. In spite of its benefits, magnesium consumption has declined over the years, partly as a result of our food becoming subject to so many more processes that deplete the magnesium, along with many other vitamins and minerals. As ever, a varied, wholegrain and natural food diet is your best bet.

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