MCVitamins News

Your Nutritional Education Site

1. The Hidden Reason You Get Flabby (Not Calories or Lack of Exercise)
2. How Stress Influences Disease: Study Targets Inflammation as the Culprit
3. California GMO Labeling Initiative Headed for Ballot: Right to Know Campaign Turns in Nearly One Million Signatures
4. Keeping your Body's pH in Balance

The Hidden Reason You Get Flabby (Not Calories or Lack of Exercise)

Diet myths abound in the health industry, but one of the biggest myths of all is the idea that a calorie is a calorie, no matter where you get it from, or what the chemical or nutritional makeup of it is. 

If you care about your health and are truly working to keep your weight down, then you need to know the truth about calories as well as the substances that distort how calories work in your body.

Read this article:  Diet Myths

How Stress Influences Disease: Study Targets Inflammation as the Culprit 

Stress wreaks havoc on the mind and body. For example, psychological stress is associated with greater risk for depression, heart disease and infectious diseases. But, until now, it has not been clear exactly how stress influences disease and health.

A research team has found that chronic psychological stress is associated with a sharp decline in the body's ability to regulate the inflammatory response. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that psychological stress impairs the body’s ability to regulate inflammation and contributes to the development and progression of disease.

“Inflammation is partly regulated by the hormone cortisol, and when cortisol is not allowed to serve this function, inflammation can get out of control,” said Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology within CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Cohen argued that prolonged stress alters the effectiveness of cortisol to regulate the inflammatory response because it decreases tissue sensitivity to the hormone. Specifically, immune cells become insensitive to cortisol’s regulatory effect. In turn, runaway inflammation is thought to promote the development and progression of many diseases.

Cohen, whose groundbreaking early work showed that people suffering from psychological stress are more susceptible to developing common colds, used the common cold as the model for testing his theory. With the common cold, symptoms are not caused by the virus — they are instead a “side effect” of the inflammatory response that is triggered as part of the body’s effort to fight infection. The greater the body’s inflammatory response to the virus, the greater is the likelihood of experiencing the symptoms of a cold.

In Cohen’s first study, after completing an intensive stress interview, 276 healthy adults were exposed to a virus that causes the common cold. The subjects were next monitored in quarantine for five days for signs of infection and illness. Here, Cohen found that experiencing a prolonged stressful event was associated with the inability of immune cells to respond to hormonal signals that normally regulate inflammation. In turn, those with the inability to regulate the inflammatory response were more likely to develop colds when exposed to the virus.

In the second study, 79 healthy participants were assessed for their ability to regulate the inflammatory response and then exposed to a cold virus and monitored for the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, the chemical messengers that trigger inflammation. He found that those who were less able to regulate the inflammatory response as assessed before being exposed to the virus produced more of these inflammation-inducing chemical messengers when they were infected.

“The immune system’s ability to regulate inflammation predicts who will develop a cold, but more importantly it provides an explanation of how stress can promote disease,” Cohen said. “When under stress, cells of the immune system are unable to respond to hormonal control, and consequently, produce levels of inflammation that promote disease. Because inflammation plays a role in many diseases such as cardiovascular, asthma and autoimmune disorders, this model suggests why stress impacts them as well.”

He added, “Knowing this is important for identifying which diseases may be influenced by stress and for preventing disease in chronically stressed people.”

Source: Sheldon Cohen, Denise Janicki-Deverts, William J. Doyle, Gregory E. Miller, Ellen Frank, Bruce S. Rabin, and Ronald B. Turner. Chronic stress, glucocorticoid receptor resistance, inflammation, and disease risk. PNAS, April 2, 2012 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1118355109

California GMO Labeling Initiative Headed for Ballot: Right to Know Campaign Turns in Nearly One Million Signatures

Foes of Genetically Modified Foods Seek Vote on Labeling in California

or the Wall Street Journal Article: 

Foes of Genetically Modified Foods Seek Vote on Labeling in California

Keeping your Body's pH in Balance

Setting aside the blood and the digestive system, the internal fluids of the body (60% of the total body weight) should be neutral. When these fluids are acidic, they are irritants. If 60% of the body is irritating the other 40% there is a chronic non-optimum situation.

How does the body get acid?

The body has natural mechanisms to eliminate acids. It can handle the natural acids created by the body which are created in energy production and the process of rebuilding cells. However, the extra acidity created by a poor diet has the body systems overwhelmed with a backlog of acids. This pH (acidity/alkaline) is important to the health of living organisms.

When a body is acidic, it creates a welcoming environment for viruses and bacteria to come in and begin to flourish. As viruses and bacteria continue to flourish inside our body, we experience lack of energy, frequent illness and pains. If a person doesn't do anything about changing the acidic state of the body, the situation can get worse. Virus or bacteria can mutate into a serious illness.

Conversely, bacteria and viruses perish in alkaline environment, because a pH balanced, or alkaline body doesn’t create the environment for viruses and bacteria to thrive and flourish. Thus, no bacteria or virus will enter an alkaline body, grow and mutate into serious illness or disease.

The bottom line is that we need to handle the reasons the body becomes acidic and there are some things that can be done. Its not only the poor nutrition but the constant bombardment of the body by pollutants and poisons, chemicals that we either ingest, breath or put into our body daily..

For the entire article, plus how to get your body alkaline go to

Is Your Body Too Acid?