Nutrition And Behavior. News and Articles on Health. Alternatives To The Corporate Government Monopoly.

I found this again this morning. It’s one of those things I found, then lost – this time I’m putting it here. Nothing like a good database for keeping track of things. At least now you will know where to find it…..even when I forget.

Diabetes has become a seemingly unstoppable national epidemic, affecting more than 20 million Americans. Conventional wisdom calls it incurable, but renowned Dr. Sir Gabriel Cousens M.D., M.D. (H), D.D. counters that claim with this medical breakthrough program. The program is based on 35 years of Dr. Gabriel Cousens’ experience in reversing diabetes naturally, and goes back to 1920 when Dr. Max Gerson healed Noble Prize Winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer of diabetes.

http://www.treeoflife.nu/reversing-diabetes/21-day-reversing-diabetes/

Also see: The complete “Food Matters” video

From Dr. Mercola,

Vitamin B12 depletion and deficiency are much more common than previously thought, especially in the over-60 population. In fact, it’s believed that almost one in four people over 60 have deficient levels of this vital vitamin.

Equally disturbing are emerging signs that other age groups harbor suboptimal blood levels of B12 as well.

Why is vitamin B12 deficiency such a big deal?

Your body depends on vitamin B12 for a host of functions, including…

• Helping to maintain normal energy levels
• Promoting healthy neurological activity, including mental alertness
• Supporting normal homocysteine levels for healthy cardiac function
• Helping to ease occasional stress and sleeplessness
• Maintaining healthy cell growth and repair
• Promoting normal immune function
• Supporting normal metabolism of carbohydrates and fats
• When your blood levels of vitamin B12 are low, one or more of these functions may be disrupted.

Without adequate blood levels of B12, you can experience symptoms related to low energy, mental fatigue, mood changes, sleep difficulties, and even occasional indigestion.

Your body relies on the efficient conversion of carbohydrates to glucose – your body’s source of fuel – just like your car needs to be able to use gas to run smoothly. Vitamin B12 plays a major role in that conversion in your body. Likewise, B12 enables your body to convert fatty acids into energy as well.

Contrary to what you might have heard, there’s really no solid evidence that supplemental vitamin B12 helps you lose weight.

Overall, vitamin B12 is a nutrient your body cannot do without for efficient, healthy metabolism of fats and carbohydrates.

How You Become Vitamin B12 Deficient

• With each advancing year, your chances of developing a vitamin B12 deficiency increases.
• The two main causes of vitamin B12 deficiency are inadequate dietary intake and the inability of your body to absorb the vitamin from food.
• Vitamin B12 is present primarily in animal sources of food–which is one of the reasons I advise against being a strict vegetarian or a vegan. This deficiency can result in less than optimal nervous system function, a tendency toward nervousness, and even less-than-optimal eye health.

I recently visited India which is primarily a vegetarian based culture and current studies there show about 80% of the adults are deficient in vitamin B12. However, vegans are not the only ones who can become vitamin B12 deficient.

The older you get the more your digestive system breaks down, especially if you have been following the standard American diet. Specifically the lining of your stomach gradually loses its ability to produce hydrochloric acid which releases vitamin B 12 from your food. The use of antacids or anti ulcer drugs will also lower your stomach acid secretion and decrease your ability to absorb vitamin B 12. Infection with Helicobactor pylori, a common contributor to stomach ulcers, can also result in vitamin B12 deficiency.

However the main cause of vitamin B 12 deficiency is a term researchers call food-cobalamin malabsorption syndrome. Cobalamin is the scientific term for vitamin B12. This typically results when your stomach lining loses its ability to produce intrinsic factor which is a protein that binds to vitamin B12 and allows your body to absorb it at the end of your small intestine.

You can read more – Subscribe to Dr, Mercola’s Free Newsletter and look at B, B-12 vitamin products

(NaturalNews ) For years, advocates of natural health have been hammering away at the message that soda causes diabetes and obesity. The soda industry, meanwhile, has remained in denial mode, mirroring the ridiculous position of the tobacco industry that “nicotine is not addictive.” Soda doesn’t cause diabetes, the industry claims, and it’s perfectly safe to consume in essentially unlimited quantities.

The Corn Refiners Association has joined the denial with its own spin campaign that seeks to convince people High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is totally natural and completely harmless. HFCS is, of course, the primary sweetener used in sodas and soft drinks.

Now comes new research presented at the American Heart Association’s Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention annual conference in San Francisco. This new research reveals that over the last decade, soda consumption has conservatively caused:

• 130,000 new cases of diabetes
• 14,000 new cases of heart disease
• 50,000 more “life years” with heart disease over the last decade

“The finding suggests that any kind of policy that reduces consumption might have a dramatic health benefit,” said senior study author Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo (associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco).

The American Beverage Association, meanwhile, says this study hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal yet and therefore it doesn’t count. Soda consumption doesn’t cause diabetes or heart disease, they claim, because “…both heart disease and diabetes are complex conditions with no single cause and no single solution.”

It’s silly logic, of course: Diabetes obviously has a cause. It’s not some spontaneous disease that appears out of nowhere. And when you go looking for the cause, you obviously have to look at dietary factors since diabetes is a disease related to the consumption and metabolism of dietary sugars. Once you do that, sodas immediately raise a red flag because they’re liquid sugar in a highly-concentrated form that does not exist naturally in nature.

HFCS doesn’t grow on trees, in other words. Nature provides sugars locked into insoluble fibers that slow digestion and lower the effective glycemic index of sugars that are consumed. In nature, sugars are always combined with minerals, too, and many of those minerals help prevent diabetes and heart disease. But High-Fructose Corn Syrup is stripped of virtually all those minerals. It contains no fiber and no healing phytonutrients that you might encounter in plants. As a result, HFCS — sometimes dubbed “liquid Satan” — might be called a dietary poison that causes disease while contributing to nutritional deficiencies that accelerate disease.

Bone loss

Interestingly, this new study did not look at loss of bone density, which is another side effect of drinking soda. Due to the extremely high acidity of the HFCS sweetener combined with the phosphoric acid used in sodas, people who drink sodas often lose bone minerals and end up being diagnosed with osteoporosis (even at a relatively young age).

Other people end up with kidney stones due to all these minerals passing through the kidneys and contributing to the built up of mineral deposits there. Long-term soda consumers may even suffer from pancreatic cancer due to the extreme stress placed on the pancreas following the consumption of liquid sugars.

In all, soda consumption is linked to at least six serious diseases:
• Diabetes
• Obesity
• Heart disease
• Cancer
• Osteoporosis
• Kidney stones

That’s why taxing sodas is more than merely a way to raise money through soda sales; it’s also a way to dramatically reduce the cost of treating these diseases. It’s no surprise that several U.S. states are now starting to seriously consider slapping new taxes on sodas and other “junk” beverages.

That’s not the way I would prefer to see the situation handled, actually. The better option, in my view, would be to ban all soda advertising by effectively stripping Free Speech rights from corporations. Such rights belong only to individuals, not multi-billion-dollar corporations. Corporations whose products physically harm the health of the population at large should not be allowed to openly advertise and promote those products to the public. They can still sell them, they just can’t advertise them.