Attaining Medical Self SufficiencyDuncan Long
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| That means that the supplement you take instead of a vitamin may be missing a key ingredient your body needs to fight cancer or other diseases.
The best bet for health, then, is to eat wisely and take supplements where necessary.
You should also be careful not to take too much of any given supplement. As with many medications, too often a little of a supplement will have desirable health effects while taking doses beyond a certain amount will cause detrimental effects. Take the recommended dosage and don't assume that more is better. Often it is not. |
| Blumberg is quick to note that, "Until such studies can be conducted, it would be premature to say that we should all run out and take extra vitamin B6, for example, in order to avoid disease." But certainly there's a lot of evidence that indicates some supplements can be a big plus in otherwise poor diets.
In a trial published in the Nov. 7, 1992 issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal, 96 healthy people, all over 65 years old, were studied. Some had low blood levels of one or more nutrients, though none had any signs of illness or exhibited nutritional deficiencies. |
| You can also find out what the medical literature has to say about various vitamin and mineral supplements. Generally mainstream medicine will be a bit too conservative about how much of these you need; after all, for years the medical establishment claimed no one needed to ever take supplements, a contention that has since been proved false j because many of the diets people adopt are far from healthy over the long haul.
On the other hand, mainstream medicine doesn't make extravagant or exaggerated claims for what supplements will do for you. Nor does it gloss over potential dangers. |
| By simply typing in the name of the vitamin or mineral in question, you can quickly discover what research has been done. Just as importantly, you can quickly discover if there have been any reports of adverse effects among people taking these supplements and — if there are — you may even be able to see at what dosage the problems start to occur (remembering that most substances go from beneficial to deadly when a certain level is exceeded).
Probably the best of these search engines for this purpose is the Mayo Clinic's "Health 0@sis" site (at http://www.mayo.ivi. |
| As the subjects continued with the new diet, their normal blood levels of vitamin B6 dropped — and their immune system also started to show poor responses to various tests the researchers were using. After the test was over, the Tufts researchers found that just modest supplements of B6 corrected both the deficiency as well as restoring immune functions.106
In the final week of the Tufts study, those involved in the dietary changes received a large dose of B6, nearly 25 times the USRDA. |
| Eat Tomatoes and Hot Peppers
In addition to being rich in vitamin C, tomatoes and peppers have some other compounds that are capable of boosting the ability of your body to hunt down and kill cancer cells — or which help you avoid the free radicals that appear to trigger the creation of cancer cells.
Hot peppers contain capsaicin which prevents carcinogens from binding to DNA. By stopping this binding action, the carcinogens are no longer able to damage the DNA. The result is a cell that stays perfect rather than becoming cancerous."
Red tomatoes contain a pigment called lycopene. |
Stephanie Beling
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 These studies went beyond the vitamin and mineral content of fruits and vegetables to their phytochemicals—and to how those phytochemicals react with one another.
What scientists found—and are still finding—was that a single fruit or vegetable contains thousands of phytochemicals in trace amounts that interact in complex but complementary ways to prevent certain diseases and boost overall health. |
Kenny Ausubel
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 I'm just a dumb nurse, and there's no way I can buy or sell a vitamin or anything else, and you know it.' 'But they're yours.' 'No, they're not mine.'
"They stood around and they said, 'Don't bother these until we tell you you can.' We got everything in the office unloaded there, and I was going out to the house to unload. They followed me to the house and the truck. And here they stand in the way, and finally I told them, 'I'm going to tell you something. Either, goddamn it, you start unloading furniture or you leave. |
Jane M. Orient, M.D.
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 There is no incentive to do $250 million worth of testing on each vitamin supplement because such things cannot be sold for $1 per pill. The same problem exists for mainstream medical therapies for rare diseases: the orphan drug problem. Worse, it exists for diseases that are very common but primarily affect poor people. For example, the world urgently needs new drugs to combat resistant malaria, a leading killer, but pharmaceutical companies are not aggressively pursuing them.
Is There a Better Way?
As I said before,"every drug is a new disease. |
Kenny Ausubel
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| Many also used vitamin and mineral supplements, as well as herbal teas.11 Orthodox medicine now increasingly acknowledges these connections. In fact, a great body of this knowledge already existed by the 1930s and 1940s, and Dr. Fishbein did much to obstruct it. Most prominent among his targets was Dr. Max Gerson, whose appearance at the 1946 congressional hearings on cancer conducted by Senator Claude Pepper brought forth provocative testimony on the ability of diet to palliate or even cure cancer.12
Dr. |
Stephanie Beling
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| Taking vitamin and mineral pills will not prevent the diseases associated with a processed-food diet. Scientists cannot formulate into pills nutrients they haven't yet discovered.
?DR. JAMES DUKE, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
Never before has the focus on the health benefits of commonly available foods been so strong. The philosophy that food can be health-promoting beyond its nutritional value is gaining acceptance within the public arena and among the scientific community as mounting research links diet /food components to disease prevention and treatment.
? |
David Heber, M.D., Ph.D.
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 In addition to eating fruits and vegetables, there are some antioxidant supplements, including vitamin E, that have been shown to reduce damage to muscle fiber following weight lifting. The signals being sent among your muscle cells are the same types of signals involved in infections, tumors, and heart disease. When these signals are traveling among cells, your DNA is subject to damage that can be blocked by the protective substances in fruits and vegetables. |
| Other plant compounds that have cholesterol-lowering effects include the phytosterols (plant sterols), found in soy and other beans; substances known as limonoids, found in the oil of lemon and orange rinds; and tocotrienols, found in plant oils, such as a rice bran oil, that also contain vitamin E.
Apolipoprotein B
Once cholesterol has been made in a liver cell, it needs to be attached to a protein to move out of the cell. The protein that carries cholesterol out of the liver is called apolipoprotein B, or apo B for short. |
| If you eat fruits and vegetables as recommended, you will get about 200 milligrams of vitamin C. So adding 500 milligrams to this is safe.
Calcium, 1,000 to 1,500 milligrams per day. With aging, the absorption of calcium is decreased. Ancient man ate about 1,600 milligrams per day in plant foods, and we evolved to absorb only a fraction of our dietary calcium. Taking calcium with a meal in the form of calcium carbonate will work well, but with age, your ability to absorb calcium is decreased due to decreased acid secretion by the stomach lining. |
Carl C. Pfeiffer
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 The adult dose of elemental zinc is 30 mg (equivalent to 300 mg zinc gluconate) taken morning and evening, and enough vitamin B6 should be given to produce normal dream recall. It is best not to take more than 500 mg without proper supervision. The avoidance of stress is also helpful.
Pyroluria can occur at any age if familial, and it can be the cause of mental retardation, minimal brain damage, epilepsy, hyperactivity, delinquency, amnesia, and one type of "schizophrenia."
Brain Allergies
The idea that food affects the mind is an alien concept to many people. |
| Sara (like the B6 deficient pregnant woman) had nausea each morning when she did not get her morning dose of vitamin B6.
8. Sara (like a class of patients labeled schizophrenic) had a fruity odor to her breath and sweat.
9. Sara reacted adversely to tranquilizers and barbiturates because her tissue enzymes were B6 deficient and could not detoxify the drugs.
10. Finally, study of Sara's symptoms and biochemistry allowed the explanation of an easily treatable type of schizophrenia in spite of three such hospital labels. |
| We were also measuring pyrroles in their urine and finally came to the conclusion that these young patients improved as the pyrrole levels decreased and the dose of vitamin B6 was increased. The patients were on zinc supplements, since we knew that histamine was stored with zinc in the terminal buds of the nerve cells. Later in 1971, a dramatic case provided the necessary data to link pyroluria with zinc and B6 deficiency. Consider Sara's story.
Since she was 11, Sara's life had been a nightmare of mental and bodily suffering. |
| With this knowledge, effective therapy was at hand, and the mauve factor patients got well when treated with both vitamin B6 and zinc. With this discovery the term "pyroluria" was coined. Since 1971 we have seen over 1,000 pyroluric patients, and most of them have responded well to B6 and zinc therapy.
Pyroluria equals a real-life family tragedy
Do you remember the French film Story of a Cheat, starring Sacha Guitry, which opened with eleven coffins being carted slowly down the tree-edge road? The cheat (played by a 10-year-old boy) walked behind the coffins. |
| You belong to an all-girl family with look-alike sisters
If so, you will benefit from:
1. vitamin B6 each morning, enough for nightly dream recall (do not exceed 2,000 mg!)
2. Zinc (as the gluconate), 30 mg, morning and evening
3. Manganese (as the gluconate), 10 mg, morning and evening
Closely ranked in creativity to the compulsive productivity of the histadelic patient is the pyroluric patient. Many great people in history have shown the signs of pyroluria. Among them are the poet Emily Dickinson and the scientific philosopher and discoverer Charles Darwin. |
Stephen T., M.D. Sinatra
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 One reason may be that the results of this study appeared just before the passage of the famous Hatch-Richardson Bill regarding the purchase of vitamin and mineral supplements.
The study population in the Finnish trial included approximately twenty-nine thousand male smokers in Finland. Most of these individuals had been smoking for thirty years. Since the average fat content of the Finnish diet was at about 38 percent of total calories, most participants had high cholesterol levels. In addition, many of the participants drank considerable quantities of alcohol. |
| Two studies recently conducted at the Harvard University School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School showed that taking 100 IU per day of vitamin E supplements for more than two years reduced the risk of heart disease by 26 percent in a group of more than 45,000 men, and by 41 percent in a group of more than 85,000 women. fact Environmental toxins such as polluted air, radiation, chemical poisons, heavy metals, auto emissions, and cigarette smoke boost our need for supplemental nutrients. |
| Usually the treatment of such a condition includes rest, alleviation of stress, and vitamin and nutritional therapy. In one study, a group of chronic fatigue syndrome patients was treated with magnesium while another group received placebos. The magnesium-treated patients had improved levels of magnesium in their red blood cells and reported heightened energy levels when compared with the others. Recent data also suggest that magnesium administered intravenously has "cured" migraine headache within minutes up to 50 percent of the time. |
| In addition to a high-fiber diet, magnesium, calcium, vitamin C, and zinc are helpful nutrients in counteracting aluminum toxicity.
Potassium
Potassium is a mineral that truly concerns physicians. The effects of either low potassium or high potassium can be life-threatening. Since potassium is necessary to the healthy functioning of nerves, cells, and membranes, it is an important electrolyte to monitor. Low potassium is a major cause of cardiac arrhythmia; diuretics for the treatment of high blood pressure or congestive heart failure may interfere with potassium absorption and excretion. |
| Despite these concerns, parents can safely give their children vitamin and mineral supplements, providing that the formula does not contain more than the RDA of iron appropriate for the child's age. In addition to supplements, parents can certainly give their children foods naturally high in iron, such as prune juice, organic raisins, or juices like V-8 vegetable cocktail.
One way to improve a poor diet is through targeted nutritional supplements. |
Kenny Ausubel
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| Nor would the cancer establishment likely take much interest in promoting someone else's proprietary formula, much less in studying an herbal compound, diet, or vitamin that cannot be patented. As a result, cancer patients were caught in a life-threatening medical crossfire.
Outsiders thus faced a Catch-22: Without research dollars, they could not conduct tests to gather data; without data, they could not publish; without published articles, they could not get research funding. If they somehow managed to operate outside of the system, their work was almost always discounted. |
David Heber, M.D., Ph.D.
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| This is really not a vitamin, since it is made by the body. It seems to have a special role in muscle cells, including those within the heart. It concentrates in the particles carrying LDL cholesterol in the blood, and protects the cholesterol from oxidation. This action is helpful in preventing the inflammation in the blood vessel wall that promotes atherosclerosis.
þ Pycnogenol, 100 milligrams per day. This is an extract of the bark of the French pine tree. |
David Brownstein
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 This section will explore the more common vitamin and mineral deficiencies that can result in abnormal thyroid function.
Iodine
The relationship between thyroid function and adequate iodine levels has been known for over 50 years. In order for the thyroid gland to make thyroid hormone, there must be adequate amounts of iodine present. In fact, T4 thyroid hormone has four iodine molecules attached to it while T3 has three iodine molecules attached to it. |
David Heber, M.D., Ph.D.
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| They store antioxidants such as vitamin E as well, so they hold the key to counteracting some of the many pesticides and toxins in the environment that are also stored in fat.
If someone drinks large amounts of carrot juice, their skin will turn bright orange. While I am not advocating that you do this, it does illustrate how the fat under the skin and throughout the body can store fat-soluble antioxidants such as the beta-carotene and alpha-carotene in carrots.
Fat Cells, Fat Cells—Everywhere
Fat cells are everywhere. |
| Storing protective antioxidants, including vitamin E and many of the colored chemicals in fruits and vegetables. Storing calories efficiently so that you can survive for prolonged periods of time without food.
Storing fatty acids that you eat and those you make from carbohydrates and proteins, so that in terms of the balance of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory fatty acids in your fat cells, you are what you eat. |
David Brownstein
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 In addition, adequate vitamin D levels are necessary for proper absorption of calcium. Calcium is found in vegetables, nuts, dairy and fish. Recommended dose: 1000-1500mg per day of calcium citrate.
3. Selenium Selenium acts as an anti-oxidant in the body. It is also important for proper thyroid function. Studies have shown (as has my clinical experience) that low selenium levels are common in arthritic patients.6 Selenium is found in nuts, seafood and grains. Recommended dose: 200-400 micrograms per day.
4. Zinc Zinc has anti-inflammatory effects. |
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