Thursday, March 18, 2010

Beware the Miracle Foods Fads

Can you tell me what you think of the nutritional or medicinal value of Chia seeds?
Sheila

I shall tell you about Chia what i tell everyone about 'miracle foods': Noni juice, Kombucha tea, Goji Berries, Chia seeds...

The only thing they have in common is that some greedy capitalists do excellent marketing on those 'healing foods'. People buy them in earnest for a lot of money and then after a while, when they realise that they didn't get the miracles they were expecting, they give up.

Meanwhile, the sharks have another product ready to market and it's alway the same: has been used for thousands of years by the ancients Aztecs/ Polynesians/ Egyptians/ Eskimos; has everything: protein/antioxidants/ omegas. They seem to always contain high levels of the nutrients currently fashionable in the popular media: so while Goji berries were touted to be full of antioxidants, Chia are full of omegas, and so on.

Let me give you an example: a couple of years ago Goji berries were sold for about $100 for a 100mls bottle of extract in fancy packaging in health food shops. Now you can buy them loose for $20 / kilo in supermarkets!

See what i mean? Next year people will feed Chia seeds to their chickens (just like the Aztec did actually).

This is the sort of things that give natural therapies a bad name. All whole foods are good for you: blueberries will give you more antioxidants than Goji berries, organic wholemeal bread is certainly better for you than white bread made with bleached flour 'enriched' with Chia seeds or any other ancient just discovered ingredient.

So beware the miracle cure. Again!

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Desire for Sweets during a Weight Loss Diet

I've decided to start a section on weight loss. It's not going to follow any particular pattern, just as brilliant thoughts strike me.

Let's say you are following a weight reduction diet and suddenly you have a craving for sweets. You've just had a great breakfast/lunch/dinner with protein in it and you are taking your (naturopath prescribed) supplements regularly and you are not hungry right now.

So what is it?

Simple! If you have already started losing weight. it's your metabolism being lazy. Yes, a bit like a bloody teenager bugging his mum to get him something out of the fridge. Now if mum says: "Get it yourself!", the kid is going to have to get it or go without. It's the same with your metabolism. If you have already started losing weight, that means you are making your metabolism work more, and it's rebelling. It wants more calories now but it doesn't want to go and break down your fat reserves, it wants the calories to be delivered to it now just like the teenager sitting on his ass.

So your choice is: either you use the excuse to have something sweet (which is how you got the extra weight in the first place), or you tell your metabolism to get off its derriere and go burn some fat. I guarantee that if you can hold out for an hour, the sweet craving will go. Absolute proof that your metabolism was trying to free load.

I am vindicated on cod liver oil

Right! Let's rewind a bit. One of my first posts was about vitamin A, was it poisonous or not and i gave you the whole low down. So go and check it.

Now let's rewind further still. I see a lot of pregnant women and their babies (After all i did write the book "Natural Childcare"). Because of this absurd fear of vitamin A poisoning in the past 10 years or so, pregnant women have absolutely stayed away from cod liver oil.

Mind you i have to put an interjection here, and you wouldn't love me so much if it wasn't for my interjections, BUT i am always amazed to see that many women are prepared to give away things like vitamins because it may be bad for the baby but somehow they are not so keen to give up alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, cannabis or pain killers. Funny about that. Glad i got that out!

Back to cod liver oil, which, remember, contains both A and D in the correct proportion. Why am i vindicated? Because recent research has shown that vitamin D deficiency in pregnancy may be one of the causes of problems such as allergies, asthma and possibly autism and ADHD in the resulting child. Ha! Told you so told you so told you so!

So, what does Grannie suggest? Simple: you can be neurotic about not taking cod liver oil in the first half of the pregnancy (after all, i keep supplements for pregnant women to a minimum myself in the first 20 weeks), that will make you feel safer, always a good thing. But after week 20 it is a good idea to get back to taking cod liver oil. And make sure it's a good clean brand, not one that contains synthetic A to boost the count. One capsule or one teaspoon a day will do. This way you will be having about 4,500 iu of A and 450 iu of D every day. Because if you are not spending enough time exposed to the sun you will be D deficient.

But vitamin D deficiency is definitely another blog.


Monday, March 8, 2010

Beware Those Attractive Supplements

OK guys! I am the first to say that we need supplements. First of all, there are not enough nutrients in the food we purchase and even if there was, because of the busy and stressful life we lead we need more help. For instance, have a cold, take more vitamin C; get older and have joint problems: take glucosamine, fish oils and calcium. These sorts of things.

It goes bad when people, from a genuine desire to help themselves and take responsibility for their own health, are taken in by wonderfully marketed products which are inevitably wrapped in very attractive packaging and which contain? CRAP!! Crap! crap! crap!

I've just spent almost an hour checking and rechecking the products a patient of mine has been taking (obviously if she's just become a patient of mine, she hasn't had much result from them) and my mind has been boggling and my blood has been boiling. Good thing I take the right nutrients.

For instance: a supplement which is meant to be full of antioxidants contains a piddly 500 micrograms of Lycopene. Now if you get one medium size tomato, you will absorb 2000 more time Lycopene. Even tomato sauce out of a bottle has hundreds of times more Lycopene per teaspoon!

Her calcium supplement (and we all know how calcium supplements are important to us who are no longer 30); well, that calcium supplement was made of calcium citrate and calcium carbonate. Both really cheap and calcium carbonate practically impossible to absorb by the human digestive tract; calcium carbonate is only good as a buffer for other supplements. What's good about them? They are cheap! Oh, no! Not cheap to you silly! Cheap to the manufacturer. Here it is: I buy calcium carbonate for my chickens (i would not give it to my horses or dogs or humans) and it costs me $13/ 5 kilos. But if you are a manufacturer and you buy it by the ton, it will only cost a few cents per kilo. Cheap indeed, but for whom? Of course someone has to pay for all the marketing and the shiny labels. Silly me!

So what to do?

First of all, avoid what i call: "kitchen sink formulae" all these 'nutrients' packed in a little pill are usually in amounts too small to be effective. Also a lot of them are antagonistic to each other; for instance if a supplement contains iron and vitamin E, then you won't get either, because iron and E make an insoluble compound that your body cannot absorb. Zinc should be taken on its own because most nutrients are antagonist to zinc.

I could go on but i won't. Just remember that when you take supplements 'simple' is the best and get the opinion of a qualified naturopath and if the naturopath gives you a 'kitchen sink' supplement, find another naturopath.

And now i'll go and take some anti-high blood pressure supplement in the form of a cup of lemon verbena tea. (although i would prefer a gin and tonic ;o) and i'm going to have a large dose of anti-oxidants in the shape of a punnet of bluberries.