Go Bananas

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Choosing the Right Banana

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Liver

Fructose and its effect on the liver

Your liver, which is made up of two main lobes, is located beneath your diaphragm and on top of your stomach, right kidney, and intestines.

Besides its primary role of protecting your body from harmful substances, your liver plays other key roles, too.

Your healthy liver:

Produces bile, which helps carry away waste and break down fats
Helps regulate the levels of sugar, protein, and fat entering your bloodstream
Clears your blood of drugs, alcohol, and other potentially harmful substances
Processes nutrients absorbed by your intestines during digestion
Produces cholesterol, proteins, and clotting factors to help your blood clot
Regulates many of your hormones
Neutralizes highly reactive oxygen molecules, or free radicals
After your liver breaks down harmful substances, they enter your blood or bile and leave your body either through your kidneys and urine or your feces after traveling through your intestines.

Normally, all these functions go on like clockwork, without much support on your part. But today many potential threats to your liver’s well-being prevail…

Is Your Expanding Waistline Putting Your Liver at Risk?
Ideal Body Weight (BMI) A renewed reminder of why it’s important to maintain your ideal body weight
Stunning new research suggests that your liver may be aging faster than the rest of your body if you hold excess weight in your waist.

Researchers found that for each 10-unit increase in body mass index, or BMI, the physiological age of the liver grew by 3.3 years.

To put that into real numbers…

Suppose a 5-foot, 8-inch man weighs 130 pounds and has a BMI of 20. A second man of the same height and age weighs 230 pounds, and has a BMI of 35.

The liver of the second man is likely five years older than the liver of the normal weight man.

And here’s another interesting finding… If the second man decided to have surgery to rapidly lose the excess weight, the age of his liver wouldn’t change!

What’s behind this vicious threat to your liver? It may be linked to one of its worst enemies.

One of Your Liver’s Worst Enemies Isn’t What You Might Expect
Drinking Alcohol harmful to your liver
I’m guessing many people would say their liver’s worst enemy is alcohol. Yes, alcohol is harmful to your liver, but there’s another substance that’s equally so – and far more pervasive.

Unlike alcohol, this other substance can be found in some form in nearly every processed food in your grocery store.

Fructose, the most damaging type of sugar to your body, is particularly hard on your liver, much like alcohol:

Fructose must be 100 percent broken down by your liver. Glucose on the other hand only needs to be partially broken down before it can be utilized.
Corn Sugars can damage your liver Corn sugars can damage your liver much like drinking alcohol
Fructose is metabolized directly into fat that gets stored in your liver and other internal organs and tissues as body fat, which leads to mitochondrial malfunction
Fructose produces toxic metabolites and superoxide free radicals when it is metabolized, that can lead to inflammation in your liver
Fructose is a cheap form of sugar that’s found in thousands of food products and drinks. It’s often deliberately disguised by the use of many different names, so the only way to steer clear of it completely is to avoid eating processed foods.

I believe fructose and other non-fiber carbs are important factors behind the rising rates of liver issues and at least 30 other health concerns. Tragically, even children are now showing signs normally associated with alcohol abuse from their consumption of fructose!

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Onions

In 1919, flu killed 40 million people. 

A doctor visited the many farmers who had the attack to see if he could help them combat the flu. 

Many of the farmers & their family had contracted the flu and many died.

However, the doctor came upon one farmer whose family was healthy and nobody in the house contracted the flu.

The doctor asked the farmer what he was doing that was different from the others. 

The farmer's wife replied that she put an unpeeled onion in a dish and placed them in all the rooms in their house.

The doctor thought that could have been the cure so he asked for one of those onions.

As he placed it under the microscope, he found the flu virus in the onion. The onions obviously absorbed all the bacteria and thereby kept the family healthy.

Now, I sent this story to a friend in Oregon who regularly contributes material to me on health issues. She replied with this most interesting experience about onions:

She said ' Thanks for the reminder. I don't know about the farmer's story but, I do know that I myself got pneumonia and became very ill. From my previous knowledge about onions, I  cut both ends off an onion put it into an empty jar, and place the jar next to myself over night. 

By the morning, I began to feel better while the onion became black.'

Lots of times when we have stomach problems we don't know what to blame. Maybe the onions that we ate earlier are to blame.

Onions ABSORB BACTERIA and that is the reason why they are so good at preventing us from getting colds & flu.

And for that very reason we should NOT eat an onion that has been sitting for a time after it has been cut open.

Left over onions are poisonous

When food poisoning is reported, the first thing the officials look for is whether the 'victim'  ate ONIONS and where those onions came from. Most probably the ONIONS, are the cause.

Onions are huge magnets for bacteria, especially uncooked ones.

Never ever keep a portion of sliced onion over a period of time and thereafter use it to prepare food. It's not even safe if you put it in a zip-lock bag and placed it in your refrigerator. It is still poisonous.

Also, do not give onions to dogs. Their stomachs cannot metabolize onions.

Please remember it is dangerous to cut an onion and try to save it to cook with the next day, it becomes highly poisonous for even a single night - as it creates toxic bacteria which causes adverse stomach infections because of excess bile secretions  and even food poisoning.

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Constipation Cure

Constipation is more than an aggravating condition; this silent epidemic has led to more than 6 million doctors’ visits and 700,000 emergency room visits, and costs billions of dollars in direct and indirect health care costs

Factors that influence your risk include eating a low fiber diet, using medications that affect your bowels, dehydration, lack of exercise and frequent use of laxatives or enemas

You may reduce your risk of chronic constipation by learning to squat when you have a bowel movement, using the bathroom when you feel the urge, getting regular exercise, eating real food and fermented food

For most people, an occasional bout of constipation is a minor aggravation. However, this is not the case for the nearly 15 percent of the U.S. population suffering from chronic constipation. This means 63 million people have difficulty passing hard, dry, lumpy stool, suffer from feeling bloated, have abdominal pain or feel as if there is something stuck in their rectum or intestines.

For many, the topic of their bowel movements is a private matter. This makes understanding and learning about the actual mechanics of how stool is produced and eliminated difficult, as many don’t find it a topic they want to discuss, even with their physicians.

The number of stools you have each week is closely linked to the types of food you eat, the amount of exercise you get and your hydration status. While many people may have a bowel movement once a day, the normal amount ranges between four times each week to several times a day.3 What differentiates infrequent stools and constipation is the consistency of the stool, the difficulty in passing it and other symptoms you may experience, such as bloating or feeling full.

Unfortunately, the number of people who suffer from chronic constipation is rising, leading to a characterization of the condition as a “silent epidemic” as those who suffer often suffer in silence.

There are a significant number of choices you make each day that increase your risk of developing chronic constipation. One is learned constipation, as your rectum is flexible and can stretch. In a study using college students, researchers found participants could easily train themselves to evacuate their bowels every 51 hours instead of every 28, leading the scientists to conclude bowel habits may induce constipation. Other factors that influence your risk include:

Low fiber diet
Changes in your routine
Lack of exercise
Avoiding a bowel movement when you have the urge
Drinking insufficient amount of fluid
Certain medications, such as opiates, antidepressants, antacids and anti-hypertensives
Frequent use of laxatives or enemas
Poor nutrition leading to vitamin deficiency, including magnesium deficiency
Iron supplements

Magnesium May Help Constipation and Protect Against Disease

One of the most popular short-term natural supplements that is effective against constipation is magnesium. Magnesium is an essential mineral and a cofactor used in multiple enzymes. A deficiency is associated with poor absorption of vitamin D and an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis and diabetes. Supplementation is being used to treat migraine headaches, hypertension and asthma.

Magnesium is important to mitochondrial health, and in the production of energy in every cell in your body. It is estimated that 50 years ago people routinely received nearly 500 milligrams (mg) of magnesium every day from their food. Today, with soil depletion and poor nutritional habits, many may only receive from 100 mg to 300 mg per day. Although organic, unprocessed foods are your best bet; the amount you receive will depend upon the soil the plants were grown in.

The recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for magnesium is between 310 to 420 mg per day, dependent upon your age and sex. However, these amounts are based on reducing your potential for deficiency and don't necessarily address the amount you need to maintain optimal health. Some researchers believe you may need between 600 to 900 mg per day. Dr. Carolyn Dean, author of "The Magnesium Miracle," recommends that you use your body as a marker for your ideal personal dose.

Begin by taking 200 mg of oral magnesium citrate each day and gradually increase the amount until you develop slightly loose stools. Magnesium citrate has a mild laxative effect — whatever your body doesn’t absorb will affect your intestines as it is flushed out through your stool, which helps you identify your personal cutoff point. There is ample evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of using magnesium to naturally improve constipation.

Magnesium comes in several forms including chelate, threonate, citrate and sulfate. Citrate is the form that has the most effect on your intestinal tract and helps produce loose stools. However, if you are taking magnesium supplements for other health reasons, my personal preference is magnesium threonate as it appears to more effectively penetrate your cell membranes and boost your mitochondrial health, thus boosting your energy level.

Try Squatting to Enhance Elimination

Sitting on your toilet may be comfortable, but placement of your knees and upper legs at 90 degrees to your abdomen actually pinches off your anal canal and makes having a bowel movement more difficult. On the other hand, when you squat, your knees are brought closer to your abdomen, which changes the relationship of your rectum and sphincter, positioning your organs and muscles in a way that relaxes your rectum. This maximizes the efficiency of your evacuation.

In this position, muscles around your rectum and pubic bones relax. This encourages complete emptying of your rectum and cecum without straining. It also reduces the potential for stagnation of stool in your lower intestines and subsequent accumulation of toxins that impact the growth of your gut microbiome. In many non-Westernized cultures people routinely squat to evacuate their bowels and don't sit on a toilet.

It is interesting to note that in cultures where people squat daily, people don't have the high prevalence of bowel diseases experienced in countries where toilets are commonplace. Squatting without support is challenging when you haven't grown up squatting on a daily basis. A simple and inexpensive method of achieving good body position is to use a small foot stool. This places your organs and muscles in a more natural position and enables easier evacuation.


The following may also help...

Add bran in roti
Oats
Brown rice
Almonds,pista,walnuts
Tomatoes, carrots, watermelon
Go for peanut butter instead of reg butter
Lots of fruits and vegetables
Green mung
Sprouts
Bananas
Raw banana as veg
Use lots of garlic
Flax seeds can be added to cereal(oats) in breakfast.

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What happens when you go off Wheat

A renowned cardiologist explains how eliminating wheat can shrink your belly and save your health.

Cardiologist William Davis, MD, started his career repairing damaged hearts through surgical angioplasty and stents.

“That’s what I was trained to do, and at first, that’s what I wanted to do,” he explains. But when his own mother died of a heart attack in 1995, despite receiving the best cardiac care, he was forced to face nagging concerns about his profession.

“I realized how silly it was,” he says. “I’d fix a patient’s heart, only to see her come back, and back and back with the same problems. It was just a band-aid, with no effort to identify the cause of the disease.”

So he sailed his practice toward highly uncharted medical territory–prevention–and spent the next 15 years examining the causes of heart disease in his own patients.

The resulting discoveries are revealed in Wheat Belly, his New York Times best-selling book, which attributes many of our nation’s physical problems, including heart disease, diabetes and obesity, to our consumption of wheat.

First of all, what is a “wheat belly”?
I make a lot of arguments about the dangers of wheat, one of which is that it raises your blood sugar dramatically. In fact, two slices of wheat bread raise your blood sugar more than a Snickers bar.

When my patients give up wheat, I see that weight loss is substantial, especially from the abdomen. People can lose several inches in the first month.You make connections in the book between wheat and a host of other health problems.

How did you come up with this theory?
Eighty percent of my patients had diabetes or pre-diabetes.

I knew that wheat spiked blood sugar more than almost anything else, so I started to say, “Let’s remove wheat from your diet and see what happens to your blood sugar.” They’d come back 3 to 6 months later, and their blood sugar would be dramatically reduced.

But they also had all these other reactions:
“I removed wheat and I lost 38 pounds.” Or, “my asthma got so much better, I threw away two of my inhalers.”

Or “the migraine headaches I’ve had every day for 20 years stopped within three days.” “My acid reflux is now gone.”

“My IBS is better, my ulcerative colitis, my rheumatoid arthritis, my mood, my sleep . . .” and so on, and so on.
So what is it about wheat that you think causes all these problems?

When you look at the makeup of wheat, it’s almost like a group of evil scientists got together and said, how can we create this god-awful destructive food that will ruin health?   

First, amylopectin A, a chemical unique to wheat, is an incredible trigger of small LDL particles in the blood–the number one cause of heart disease on the United States.

When wheat is removed from the diet, these small LDL levels plummet by 80 and 90 percent.

We’ve had a situation where the national advice–to cut fat and eat more whole grains–is advocating a diet that causes heart disease.
You also talk about the “addictive” properties of wheat.

Wheat contains high levels of gliadin, a protein that actually stimulates appetite. Eating wheat increases the average person’s calorie intake by 400 calories a day.    

Gliadin also has opiate-like properties in the brain, so it’s not surprising that when some people remove wheat from their diets, they literally go through a period of withdrawal where they feel terrible.

Food scientists have known this for 20 years, and they’ve used it to their advantage. If you go up and down the supermarket shelves, you’re going to see wheat flour in the most improbable places—everywhere from Campbell’s soup to granola bars.

Is eating a wheat-free diet the same as a gluten-free diet? I know that’s a major trend right now.
Gluten has negative, inflammatory properties, but it is just one component of wheat.

In other words, if I took the gluten out of it, wheat will still be terrible for you since it will still have the Gliadin and the amylopectin A, as well as several other undesirable components.

They’ve come out with all these foods that are gluten free: gluten-free multi-grain bread, gluten-free bagels, etc.
Those are made with 4 basic ingredients: corn starch, rice starch, tapioca starch or potato starch.
And those 4 dried, powdered starches are some of the very few foods that raise blood sugar even higher than wheat does!Sounds like all the “fat free” foods that came out 10-15 years ago. People thought “these cookies are good for me because they don’t have fat.”Perfect analogy. Yes, it’s the same kind of blunder.

What about the the health breads and the sprouted breads?
No. They still retain too much of the adverse wheat compounds–leptins, amylopectin A, gluten and gliadin. You might reduce the amount of some of the compounds, but they’re still there.

I encourage people to return to real food: vegetables and nuts, unpasteurized cheese and eggs and meats in all forms, avocados and olives.

People have been eating it for thousands of years, why is it suddenly such a problem?

Wheat really changed in the 70s and 80s due to a series of techniques used to increase yield, including hybridization and back crossings. It was bred to be shorter and sturdier and also to have more gliadin, a potent appetite stimulate.

The wheat we eat today is not the wheat that was eaten 100 years ago. Wheat has also become a much more central part of the American diet.

What if I remove the wheat, but I’m still eating carbohydrates?

So, for example, I stop eating my sandwich every day, and I start eating rice with chicken and vegetables. Will I still have the health benefits? Will I still lose weight?Most do, yes. Because rice doesn’t raise blood sugar as high as wheat, and it also doesn’t have the amylopectin A or the gliadin that stimulates appetite. You won’t have the same increase in calorie intake that wheat causes.

That’s part of the reason why foreign cultures that don’t consume wheat tend to be slenderer and healthier.Does everyone need to stop eating wheat, or are some people more at risk for these problems than others?

If you ask me, everyone should stop eating wheat. This is the closest I know of to something that will transform your life.

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Osteoporosis and the Benefits of Exercising

Osteoporosis is a common problem, affecting an estimated 1 in 10 women worldwide at the age of 60. By the time a woman reaches the age of 80, she has a 2-in-5 chance of developing osteoporosis. In most people, sometime during your 30s your bone mass will start to gradually decline. For women, that bone loss can significantly speed up during the first decade of menopause.

Statistics suggest that, worldwide, 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men over the age of 50 will experience an osteoporosis-related bone fracture. In 2000, there were 9 million osteoporotic fractures, including 1.6 million hip fractures — a quarter of which occurred in men — which can lead to a significant decline in health and quality of life. Hip fractures can also be life-threatening. Twenty percent of those who break a hip die in the first 12 months following the fracture.

Statistics also reveal that osteoporosis is becoming more prevalent. In the decade between 1990 and 2000, the number of hip fractures increased by 25 percent worldwide.2 So, what can be done about this problem? It’s important to realize that osteoporosis is preventable by “proper living,” meaning eating right, getting nutritional movement and effective exercise.

Weight-bearing exercises are particularly important for the prevention of osteoporosis, which is characterized by porous and fragile bones. Unfortunately, drugs are typically the first-line remedy recommended by conventional doctors. This is tragic, considering these drugs do more harm than good.

Your Lifestyle Largely Determines Your Osteoporosis Risk

While diet certainly plays an important role, weight-bearing exercise is one of the most effective remedies against osteoporosis. For example, the walking lunge is a great exercise for building bone density in your hips, even without any additional weights. It is an absolutely extraordinary exercise and doesn’t cost anything to do. You can use YouTube to find demonstrations of how to do it properly.

Balance-building exercises like yoga and Tai Chi are also recommended. As long as you have strong muscles, bones and steady balance, your risk of falling is minimized. Should you fall, your chances of actually breaking a bone are also dramatically reduced.

Needless to say, the earlier you start exercising, the better — provided you keep it up. Exercise is really a lifelong lifestyle component, not a temporary fix for any particular problem. That said, even if you’re older, you can still improve your bone health. It’s never too late to start exercising. It just gets a bit more challenging, since you’re starting at a lower level of fitness with each passing year of inactivity. Below I’ll offer some effective exercise alternatives that can be particularly helpful if your fitness level is low. As noted by Fight Aging:

“The research materials … argue that the majority of people are not aware of the degree to which they are harming themselves, and that efforts should be taken to correct this … In our technological society of cheap calories, easy transportation, and replacements for physical labor, most people eat too much and exercise too little.

That becomes ever more pronounced over the years … This has a cost when it comes to health … Avoidable damage done to health over the long term is often referred to as secondary aging. It includes … accelerated loss of muscle resulting from lack of exercise. Near everyone in later life fails to exercise sufficiently, as demonstrated by study after study showing improvement in the muscle and health of even very old people following modest resistance exercise programs.”

Exercise Naturally Builds Stronger Bones
Aside from walking lunges, high-impact exercises such as sprinting and jumping are also effective, as is weight training. In one 2014 study, women between the ages of 25 and 50 who performed a minimum of 10 “flea leaps” in a row, twice a day for four months, significantly increased the bone density in their hipbones.

An earlier study found hopping and weightlifting increased bone density in the spine by 2 percent. Weight training targeting both the upper body and legs was particularly effective. Keep in mind that you’re not restricted to any particular type of exercise though. For example, you don’t have to use weight gym equipment if you don’t want to. Other examples of high-impact weight-bearing exercises recommended by the U.S. National Osteoporosis Foundation include:

Dancing
High-impact aerobics
Hiking
Jumping rope
Climbing stairs
Playing tennis
Lower impact weight-bearing exercises, which are a safer alternative if you’re frail include:

Low-impact aerobics
Stair-step machines
Fast walking

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