If you would like a half price coupon for a full session of either Structural Integration, Acupuncture, an awesome Massage, a foot-detox session with massage, a private Vinyasa Yoga session, or a Personal Trainer sessions please go to my website and send your email and mailing addresses. I will mail you the gift certificates or I can email you a printable version. Don’t wait as this promotion expires at the end of May. This is part of the ongoing launch of the new Center for Structural Wellness in NYC. We also offer sessions of physical therapy, chiropractic, nutrition, colonics, pilates, and Alexander Technique. Please inquire if you have any questions about your structural wellness.

I know most of you remember this from the New York Times, but I just had to put it out again as it’s importance and relevance is paramount. It’s easy to forget that Mercury is a huge problem when it gets into our nervous system thus compromising our brain function.

What is mercury?
From MSU:

Mercury can exist as monomethylmercury (MeHg). This form of mercury is 100 to 1000 times more toxic then natural mercury. MeHg participates directly in biochemical reactions. MeHg is created both by humans and by the environment. Industry uses MeHg, and in the past there have been poisonings due to industrial discharge. MeHg is also created through biomethylation processes in the environment, and this MeHg bioaccumulates primarily in fish. The greatest source of MeHg is natural biomethylation, and fish consumption is the principal source of MeHg intake for most people.

How do you test to find out your mercury levels?

Blood, urine, and hair analysis can reveal recent or acute mercury poisoning but these tests don’t do well to uncover chronic accumulation.

How does mercury hurt us?

Monomethylmercury (MeHg) is an estimated 100 to 1000 times more toxic (than elemental mercury) to humans. In fact, MeHg seems to specifically target the advanced Central Nervous System (CNS). Until recently, this was a mystery, as the CNS enjoys the protection of the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB). The BBB consists of tightly packed endothelial cells that line the walls of the blood capillaries in the CNS. The key to understanding why MeHg is so toxic is to see that structural similarities in biochemical reactions can lead to active transport of toxins. In this case organisms with a highly advanced CNS, like humans, this active transport can lead to a brain accumulation of MeHg.

As mentioned before, most of our exposure to MeHg comes from bioaccumulations in fish. When we eat contaminated fish, this ingested MeHg easily passes through the intestines and into the bloodstream. The pathway of MeHg from the bloodstream to the brain is complicated, and we think it is easiest to understand the pathway through a list of the various processes involved:

1. MeHg in blood plasma can combine with cysteine, forming a compound that is structurally similar to the amino acid methionine

2. This MeHg-cysteine compound is actively transported into the endothelial cells in the BBB, on the methionine carrier.

3. A high level of reduced glutathione is maintained in the endothelial cells, and the MeHg switches from a cysteine carrier to a glutathione carrier.

4. MeHg-glutathione is actively transported out of the endothelial cells and into the brain.

5. In the brain, the hydrolysis of MeHg-glutathione generates MeHg-cysteine.

6. This MeHg-cysteine can now enter nerve cells in the brain, where it accumulates.

What if you have high levels of mercury?

Chelation therapy is one option for removing mercury. EDTA is used to bond to mercury in your body and help you safely eliminate it through your urine. Click here for ACAM certified doctors in the NY/NJ area.

Note: I looked for information on the negative side effects of chelation therapy and only came across a piece from Quackwatch - the website of the now disgraced Stephen Barrett, who lost in court in 2005 when it was revealed that he was not a real doctor of psychiatry and was actually paid by the American Medical Association, Federal Trade Commission, and the FDA to “de-bunk” alternative and complementary medicine. We must persevere and stay diligent in our research to show how amazing alternative medicine is when it complements the body’s natural healing response. I can not express how happy I am to see Barrett destroyed in the public arena and his covert relationship with the medical industry’s corporate agenda exposed to us all.

After a client told me her husband was gaining weight on a low calorie diet because he “ate like a Sumo”, it dawned on me that I ate like this to! What is this diet and why does that happen. Upon further research I realized that it was not just me, but so many of my friends do as well. So I asked myself, does the NY lifestyle with its ’snack on the run’ mentality keep our metabolism low only to bite us on the ass by converting the food when we do eat to fat on the ass? We tend to eat a minimal breakfast - only coffee sometimes (does the latte count as a full meal?), skip lunch, and then meet up with friends at night at a great restaurant and indulge in a high calorie meal. Sometimes I eat the whole bread basket myself and drink the ramekin of butter with a straw I’m so hungry. I thought I was gaining weight because I was exercising less due to a higher client load, now I realize its the timing of my meal more then anything that counts.

How to eat like a Sumo Wrestler from Dietblog:
1. Skip breakfast. By depriving their bodies of food after eight hours of sleep, their metabolic rates stay low.
2. Exercise on an empty stomach. If their bodies have
no food, their metabolic thermostats are turned down even lower to conserve fuel.
3. Take a nap after eating. The Sumo secret for gaining weight is that, after eating, they sleep for at least four hours.
4. Eat late in the day. Going to bed with full stomachs means that their bodies must respond to the huge flood of nutrients with a rush of insulin, forcing their bodies to store some of it in the cells as fat instead of in the muscles and organs as nutrients.
5. Always eat with others in a social atmosphere. According to leading researchers, a meal eaten with others can be at least 44 percent larger and with 30 percent more calories and fat.

And the facts are in:
New Yorkers have finally ecclipsed the nationwide obesity rate! From the Daily News,

New Yorkers collectively gained more than 10 million pounds in two years, according to Health Department data released Wednesday.

This is a great article I’m reprinting in its entirety from the Smart Skin Care site, an independent research collective that does not sell or endorse any products.

An ideal clinical study is set up something like this. First, find a large uniform pool of candidates and randomly assign them to two groups. Second, change a single variable in a controlled way, e.g. administer a nutrient or a drug to the one group and give a placebo to the other group. Importantly, neither the administering doctors nor the subjects should know who is giving/getting what. After the treatment, analyze the results and make a conclusion whether the difference in the outcome between the groups is likely to be due to random statistical variations or the effect of the treatment. Such a study, especially if repeated by several independent groups of researchers unaffiliated with commercial interests, gives you a decent chance of arriving at the truth about the value of the treatment in question.

Well, I have to disappoint you but conducting such a study to find the best diet to prevent or reduce wrinkles is next to impossible in real life. First, a dietary intervention involves too many variables — it is not practicable to vary every single aspect of a diet separately while keeping everything else constant. Second, long-running, interventional studies are very expensive. It is next to impossible to patent a diet, so such a study would require extremely generous public funding, which is hard to obtain for only a “beauty-threatening” problem like wrinkles. And there are other obstacles too. In other words, don’t hold your breath for a definitive study showing what diet is the best ‘wrinkle cure’.

The most comprehensive such study to date was published by researchers from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 2001 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. The researchers analyzed the diets of 453 people (aged 70 years and over from Australia, Greece and Sweden) to determine the correlation, if any, between the consumption of certain types of foods and skin wrinkling.

The overall conclusion was that a low-glycemic diet high in varied fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and fish was associated with less skin wrinkling. Specifically, the following food were noted:

Foods associated with less wrinkling

In the Monash study, less skin wrinkling in the elderly was associated with higher intakes of:

Total fat
Mono-unsaturated fat
Olive oil and olives
Fish (especially fatty fish, such as sardines)
Reduced fat milk and milk products, such as yogurt
Eggs
Nuts and legumes (especially lima and broad beans)
Vegetables (especially leafy greens, spinach, eggplant, asparagus, celery, onions, leeks and garlic)
Wholegrain cereals
Fruit and fruit products (especially prunes, cherries, apples and jams)
Tea
Water
Zinc (foods which contain zinc include seafood, lean meat, milk and nuts).

Foods associated with more wrinkling

More skin wrinkling in the elderly was associated with higher intakes of:

Saturated fat
Meat (especially fatty processed meats)
Full fat dairy products (especially unfermented products and ice cream)
Soft drinks and cordials
Cakes, pastries and desserts
Potatoes
Butter
Margarine

This is an important list of chemicals you absolutely must avoid in any products that touch your skin or enter your body. Our skin can absorb an incredible 60% of what is rubbed onto it. Depending on the size of the chemicals, they may be able to enter your bloodstream in as quickly as 20 minutes. Here is a list of must avoids from the Dr. Mercola site:

Mineral Oil, Paraffin, and Petrolatum – Petroleum products that coat the skin like plastic, clogging pores and creating a build-up of toxins, which in turn accumulate and can lead to dermatologic issues. Slows cellular development, which can cause you to show earlier signs of aging. Suspected cause of cancer. Disruptive of hormonal activity. By the way, when there’s an oil spill in the ocean, don’t they rush to clean it up – fast? Why put that stuff on your skin?
Parabens – Widely used as preservatives in the cosmetic industry (including moisturizers). An estimated 13,200 cosmetic and skin care products contain parabens. Studies implicate their connection with cancer. They have hormone-disrupting qualities – mimicking estrogen – and interfere with the body’s endocrine system.

Phenol carbolic acid– Found in many lotions and skin creams. Can cause circulatory collapse, paralysis, convulsions, coma and even death from respiratory failure.
Propylene glycol – Used as a moisturizer in cosmetics and as a carrier in fragrance oils. Shown to cause dermatitis, kidney or liver abnormalities, and may inhibit skin cell growth or cause skin irritation.

Acrylamide– Found in many hand and face creams. Linked to mammary tumors in lab research.
Sodium laurel or lauryl sulfate (SLS), also known as sodium laureth sulfate (SLES)– Found in car washes, engine degreasers, garage floor cleaners… and in over 90% of personal care products! SLS breaks down the skin’s moisture barrier, easily penetrates the skin, and allows other chemicals to easily penetrate. Combined with other chemicals, SLS becomes a “nitrosamine”, a potent class of carcinogen. It can also cause hair loss. SLES is sometimes disguised with the labeling “comes from coconut” or “coconut-derived”.

Toluene – Poison! Danger! Harmful or fatal if swallowed! Harmful if inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Made from petroleum or coal tar, and found in most synthetic fragrances. Chronic exposure linked to anemia, lowered blood cell count, liver or kidney damage, and may affect a developing fetus. Butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) contains toluene. Other names may include benzoic and benzyl.

Dioxane– Found in compounds known as PEG, Polysorbates, Laureth, ethoxylated alcohols. Common in a wide range of personal care products. The compounds are usually contaminated with high concentrations of highly volatile 1,4-dioxane, easily absorbed through the skin.
Dioxane’s carcinogenicity was first reported in 1965 and later confirmed in studies including one from the National Cancer Institute in 1978. Nasal passages and liver are the most vulnerable. Dioxane is easily removed during the manufacturing process by “vacuum stripping”. Warning: It is a synthetic derivative of coconut. Watch for hidden language on labels, such as “comes from coconut”.

Just for instance, the ingredients in Pfizers popular moisturizer, Lubriderm, are:
Water, mineral oil, petrolatum, sorbitol, lanolin, lanolin alcohol, stearic acid, triethanolamine, cetyl alcohol, fragrance, butylparaben, methylpapaben, propylparaben, sodium chloride.

So what are our options? I’ve been using the Natural Body Butter that Dr. Mercola has on his site. It’s practically edible and really does have a nice consistency and work well for delivering the moisture your skin needs.

It’s important to make a clear distinction that all water is not created equal. And I’m not talking about taste. As a snowflake falls to the ground it has a high coherence of hexagonal structure (6 branches) and when it melts retains this coherence in the hydrogen bonds to other H2O molecules. The unique quality of these hydrogen bonds is that they are incredibly strong and make it a good conductor of electricity and also a good solvent for biological materials. This is because it has small positive charge on the hydrogen end and small negative charge on the oxygen end. Now, why is this important to us? As human beings we are essentially water movers. We are born almost 95% water and if we live long enough, 55% water. To me, aging seems to be a dehydration process. So how do we stay hydrated properly?

We can drink naturally structured water, which comes from very pure places like Icelandic glaciers, or Hawaiian or Fijian springs. This water is easily assimilated and very hydrating. The downside to these bottled waters is the high environmental impact of transportation, plastic manufacturing, and besides the risk of potential carcinogenic chemicals from the plastic seeping into the water. We really don’t need to add to the North Pacific Greyere, a floating mass of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean either. So now what?

There are multiple options for getting bio-available water from the tap. Bio-availablility means water that actually makes it into the cells for proper hydration. I’ve had a Jupiter Microlite for years and like the way it tastes and feels going down the gullet. It alkalizes, ionizes, and filters the water all to the tune of “Home Sweet Home”. I’m upgrading to the Jupiter Melody soon - it features an endless supply of water without having to wait for it to get “processed”. It’s a bit pricy at $1250 but I’m ordering a bunch and I can get a couple of hundred off. I’m happy to pass on any savings if anyone wants one. A friend of mine distributes the Kangen water filters but they are way too pricey (over $3k) for not much benefit. I’m not even sure there is a benefit to the Jupiter brand.

Doctor Terry Grossman and Ray Kurzweil were at first skeptical of a water ionizer’s ability to create alkaline water. So they tested the water themselves with a pH meter and an ORP meter. They concluded, “The negative ions in alkaline water from an electrolysis machine are a rich source of electrons that can be donated to these free radicals in the body, neutralizing them and stopping them from damaging healthy tissues.”

Warning: One of the biggest problems and misconceptions are the benefits of Brita and Pur drinking filters. These company’s boast pure healthy water but what actually happens is the filtered water is turned acidic. My home Ph testing kit revealed that new and used filters can make the water up to 5.5 acidic. Oh my god, this is so scary. With evidence pointing to the health benefits of alkaline diets, drinking neutral or alkaline water should match and increase our health. I think what is happening is that these type of cartridge filters strip all the minerals from the water rendering it acidic whereas ionizing filters organize the minerals into alkaline and acidic and split them into different membranes. You drink the alkaline side of the water and the acidic water goes down the sink. Acidic water can be used for washing things like fruit, bath tubs, or your face. This is what I would use Brita for - but absolutely do not drink it!
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For all you fish connoisseurs out there, here is the Ocean’s Alive eco/health report. Above and beyond the toxins in the fish, I find it difficult to justify farmed fishing with all its inherent ecological impact and ethical ramifications, but the idea of over-fishing is just as appalling. What can a vegaquarian do? Here is the ecological impact report.

I had the privilege of having dinner with Dr. Timothy Brantley and hearing first hand what he has been researching, treating and curing. “Wow!” is all I can say about this amazing book. An absolute must read for anyone suffering from anything. His nutrition facts are pure and objective since he tests out everything on the #1 guinea pig - himself! It covers why we are depleted of enzymes and how chewing your food and eating raw can replenish them. Why drinking structured water actually hydrates and why most of us are dehydrated even if we drink plenty of regular water. Did you know that table salt is recognized by the body as a toxin and pulls water out of individual cells into the surrounding tissues? Pure sea salt is the only salt we should ever have. And most importantly the fact that cooked foods is recognized by the human body as a foreign invader and causes a white blood cell inflammatory response called “Leukocytosis”. “The Cure” covers it all and is an honest read about Dr. Brantley’s real life experience and what it was like to treat many of his patients. I know this book will save many, many lives.

“I’ve been asked the following question countless times during my years of practice, What’s really killing us? The simple answer is CANCER, HEART DISEASE, DIABETES AND OBESITY. But that’s not the question. The real question to me was what CAUSES these diseases and could I STOP them from killing my patients. I spent over two decades in clinical practice working with thousands of patients to discover the answers to these exact questions. That’s why I was compelled to write my book, “The Cure” …so that each and every one of you could learn the secrets to take control of your body and heal yourselves naturally. REMEMBER: WE ARE THE CAUSE AND WE ARE THE CURE!” -Dr. Timothy Brantley

Order your book now on Amazon or Wiley. “The Cure” is available everywhere.

You can find raw, unpasteurized milk in New York. I’ve been buying raw cheeses but haven’t seen any raw milk in any health food stores including Commodoties, my local haunt. Pasteurization kills the healthy natural enzymes in the milk that aid in digestion. It creates a dead food. For more information on raw dairy check out the Raw Milk Facts site.

This is from the “Real Milk” website:

Pasteurization destroys enzymes, diminishes vitamin content, denatures fragile milk proteins, destroys vitamins C, B12 and B6, kills beneficial bacteria, promotes pathogens and is associated with allergies, increased tooth decay, colic in infants, growth problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease and cancer.

Pasteur had reason to help sterilize the unsanitary 1920’s agricultural conditions that were creating health problems; but its 2007 and we need to smarten up and educate ourselves so we can properly nourish our families.

Here is the list:
Barker: Teacup Farm , 2278 Johnson Creek RD, Niagara County, http://www.teacupfarm.com/
Expect NYS certifcate to sell raw cows milk 2-3-07. Supplies are limited. $5. a gallon bring your own contianer. Anticipated certification to sell raw goat’s milk spring 2007, Starting
to form a buyers list. Raw Goats Milk will be $5.00 a gallon. Bring your own containers.
(716) 795-3651 or cell (716) 807-2963, EMAIL- Teacuplizzy@aol.com or Neadow7@msn.com . All Naturally Beef and Pork, Fresh Brown Eggs. Live goats for sale for meat. No Antibiotics or Hormones in either milk or meat.
Clifton Springs: Galens Homestead Acres, Steve and Hope Galens, 3023 Taylor Rd., Clifton Springs, NY 14432, (315) 462-5178, galens@fltg.net . NYS licensed to sell raw milk from the farm. 50 Holstein-mix cows, pasture-fed as weather allows, low somatic cell count.
Clyde: JD Farm owners Paul and Linda Jeremenko, 9777 Old Rt. 31, Clyde,New York 14433, (315) 923-7660, Pasha7660@yahoo.com . Raw milk available, no antibiotics or hormones, pasture fed. Organic certified. Read the rest of this entry »

Diet is the number one controllable factor of preventative medicine. Through eating a truly balanced diet, and limiting the number of processed and conventionally grown foods, we can feel great on a daily basis. Our bodies can resist common colds and viruses and repair itself from dis-ease. Health is about balance. The human body will always migrate towards balance, unless it is restricted one way or another. A few principles you should always consider with diet include:

1. Drink more water than you think (and less when you are eating - it dilutes your digestive enzymes). Try taking a digestive enzyme supplement before eating if you usually feel bloated and tired after a meal. Try ‘Garden of Life’ products, they’re awesome.
2. Try to consume primarily organic foods. Not many people can say their heart disease (1 in 6 affected in this country) was caused from eating too many fruits and vegetables. It’s worth the extra money - you not only support sustainable agriculture and prevent environmental destruction, your food has more available nutrients which makes your body much healthier.
3. If you do choose to eat animal products - buy organic grass-fed meat and stick to cold water, wild caught fish. Note: Avoid farm-raised salmon (which is what you are getting at restaurants if it doesn’t specifically say “wild caught”). Avoid shellfish and bottom dwellers - toxins are concentrated in their flesh which then find their way into your flesh.

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