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Your Nutritional Education Site
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Your Nutritional Education Site
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1. 12 Food Additives You Should Remove from Your Diet
2, Dehydration - Its summer. This article is about hydration,
why it is crucial to a healthy body.
3. The Difference Between Drugs and
Nutrition Supplements for the treatment of Neuropathy - or for any
drug and natural treatment.
4. What are nutritional deficiencies and what do they do to your health.
5. Are you getting enough Vitamin C to protect your body from illness and
disease?
12 Food Additive You Should Remove from your
Diet
A good article on watching the labels for additives that are medically questionable: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/07/14/12-Food-Additives-to-Remove-From-Your-Diet.aspx
Dehydration, Balanced hydration is crucial to a healthy body
What is dehydration?
Dehydration is simply a lack of enough water and electrolytes in the body.
Causes of Dehydration
It can be caused by water loss or by an inadequate water intake.
Water loss can be due to excessive physical activity, sweating due to heat, vomiting, or even diarrhea.
Dehydration can also occur due to alcohol consumption and caffeine consumption both of which cause water as well as vital nutrients and salts to be flushed from the system.
Another cause of dehydration is due to some prescriptions.. When taking prescription medications, necessary care needs to be taken to make sure that this is prevented.
Any sport or exercise that causes one to sweat can cause dehydration if it lasts long enough, is strenuous enough or is accompanied by either hot weather or too much clothing. Dehydration is even present when its cold out and you are involved in sport like skiing, snowboarding or running. Due to the cold you don't notice how much fluids your body is losing.
Symptoms of Dehydration
The usual first symptom on dehydration is thirst. When the body is dehydrated it can give the perception of hunger, when in fact, it is actually in need of hydration.
As a person becomes more dehydrated - irrespective of the cause - symptoms include dry mouth, weakness, dry skin, nausea, headaches, dizziness and tiredness.
Dehydration and Electolytes: What are electrolytes?
Electrolytes are minerals, such as potassium, sodium, calcium and magnesium. They are dissolved in the body’s fluids Electrolytes affect the movement of substances between body fluids and tissues, and are crucial for normal function and metabolism. ...Electrolytes can also help regulate your body’s acid-base balance
Dehydration and Heat Exhaustion
Heat exhaustion is the commonest form of dehydration.
Heat exhaustion occurs when your body gets too hot. . Its symptoms are profuse
sweating, dizziness and weakness, nausea and vomiting, rapid heartbeat, flushing
of the skin, headaches, muscle cramps and extreme fatigue.
An example of a warning sign is: when you have been working in your garden,
stand up, are woozy and almost pass out. Another example is the “oh,
I’m
so tired, I just have to lie down and take a nap”
feeling that comes over you after a morning on the Little League bleachers. It
could be as subtle as a slight headache after a day at the beach.
The problem with dehydration and heat exhaustion is caused by the depletion of
fluid, salt, potassium and electrolytes in the body - the electrolytes.
When you sweat, you’re
losing water, salt (sodium), potassium and other minerals from your body.
Water & Electrolytes
So what is “enough
water”?
You should be drinking half of your body weight in ounces of water a day, For
example, if you weight 160 pounds, drink 80 ounces of water, or 10-8 oz.
Glasses.
The cells need to be hydrated and you need to drink water. If you want to drink
an “energy”
drink, then stay away from the drinks that are high in sugar content. There are
some “better”
energy drinks that can be found in your local health food store, but that’s
not a substitute for good water.
Along with the water, you need to have, salt, potassium and cell salts. These
are the components that are necessary to drive the water into the cells instead
of straight into the toilet.
Electrolyte drinks are useful in overcoming dehydration and is effective for body re-hydration after exercise. It helps promote a healthy lifestyle – at any age.
Electrolytes including Potassium
Dr. Berg’s Electrolytes has the most potassium of any electrolyte power mix!
Dr. Berg’s Electrolyte Powder is the perfect combination of electrically conducting minerals and trace minerals. Electrolytes when dissolved in water create charged elements ready to hydrate the body cells and energize the body. These active minerals assist in nerve conduction as well as muscle contraction and relaxation.
You can learn more about this supplement at Dr. Berg's Electolytes. This page includes 4 educational videos about electrolytes and their need for your health.
Electrolyes: Rehydrate & Rejuvenate! as well as Energize & Recharge Your Cells!
Learn more at Dr. Berg's Electrolytes
The Difference Between Drugs and Nutrition Supplements for the treatment of Neuropathy
No matter what the cause of your neuropathy, a person has only a few choices about what to do about it..
The Drug Approach
What a drug does is it forces the body to do something that it normally wouldn't do.. When it comes to a medication, the body reacts in certain ways to this medication and it is done in order to achieve a desirable effect. For instance, in order to balance itself and handle the effects of a drug, the body has to lower its blood pressure. If this is what you want to happen because its a blood pressure medication, it's a good thing. However, there are also various other ways the body can react to the drug and sometimes this is not such a good thing - this is called a "side effect". It is the reason someone can wind up on 4 blood pressure medications. Each drug is given in an attempt to balance another drug so as not to create the various side effects of the other drugs. It is a balancing act.
The Natural Approach
What a nutritional supplement does is give the body the actual tools it needs to fix the body.
In the case of neuropathy, it is the nerve cell that is damaged. The body needs certain tools (nutritional factors) to do this repair. Drugs don't repair anything; they treat the symptom, not the cause of the problem.
As with our example of blood pressure, if they don't know what is causing the high blood pressure, the drug just lowers it artificially.
The cause of nerve damage is known - it can be the result of too much sugar in the blood, the chemicals used in cancer treatments, etc. - but one thing is known, the damage is done to the cell and this causes the pain.
You can cover this up with pain killers, or with other drugs that are manufactured to handle this, but the drugs aren't repairing anything. They are trying to forces the body to not give you pain, not give you numbness, etc., And sometimes more damage to the nerve cell might happen due to the drug or other drugs you are taking,
The Nutritional Approach
Nutritional supplements are actually vitamins and minerals that the body needs to repair the cells.
In the case of neuropathy, there are specific ingredients needed by the body to repair the cells. These are the supplements you want to take.
Another difference is that if you are taking a drug and just covering up symptoms, you have to continue to take the drug to get relief and sometimes even have to increase the drug to get the same relief.
If you take natural supplements, the body can fix the problem, and as long as you don't do anything to damage the cells again, there is an end to taking the supplements.
For neuropathy
see: Nerve Support
Formula
What are nutritional deficiencies and what do they do to your health?
A deficiency is basically
a nutrient that your body does not have enough of to function properly.
What if you forgot to put
enough oil in you car? Despite
the fact that it was getting the air, gas, functioning spark plugs and good
combustion, the car wouldn’t work properly.
Sure the piston would go up and down and the car would move forward –
just like normal. But soon the
engine might run a little hot. Down
in the engine different things might start happening.
The rings around the piston that stopped oil from getting up into the
combustion area might be giving way. The
normal straight camshaft might start to bend a little.
The engine just won’t work right. Perhaps the car will need a small
repair, or maybe a major overhaul – or ignored the engine will just seize up
and “die”.
It’s the same with your
body – except that you can’t just buy another engine and repairs made to a
damaged body might not put things back together again.
Let’s look at some of
the many varied things that can happen when you don’t put the needed nutrients
into the body, and wind up with a deficiency.
Gingivitis is created when
plague (sticky deposits of bacteria, mucus and food particles) adheres to the
teeth, hardens and irritates the gum. The accumulation causes the gums to become
infected and swollen. As the gums swell, pockets form between the gums and the
teeth and act as a trap for more plague. Irritated gums bleed and
eventually start to recede.
This irritation can be
fought by introducing Vitamin C, which fights the formation of plaque.
Now gingivitis, untreated, can progress to periodontal disease, which
means loose teeth and false teeth. Seems
like it would be easier just to get enough C.
C would have fought the formation of plaque to begin with.
Does that sound too easy?
Remember in the fast food lifestyle that we live in, we need a Vitamin C
to fight the many problems in that lifestyle – processed foods, polluted air,
etc. You need enough so that your gums get enough.
Vitamin B12 comes from
meat, eggs, fish and milk, but not everyone eats these and they do not eat
enough to fight the depletion that happens from day to day living.
Alcohol, coffee, tobacco to name a few can also deplete the body of
vitamin B12.
What happens when you have
a deficiency of Vitamin B12? It can
bring about nerve degeneration. Vitamin
B12 supports the sheathing that protects nerve cells. Damage to the nerve
sheathing can produce numbness, tingling and the pain. It’s called neuropathy.
Neuropathy can be a side effect of cancer treatments, certain
medications, toxins, diabetes, and many other things.
And the funny part about it is that all reasons one can get neuropathy
could have been prevented in the first place with the proper nutrients.
We have all heard the
problems from someone smoking, but even if you smoke, you can still take
vitamins to compensate for the depletion of vitamins that it causes.
There are a lot of
problems that deficiency causes. One
of the reasons for the website is to help you understand those deficiencies and
allow you to fix nutritional deficiencies and build good health.
Remember when you build good health, disease tends to fade away.
For More info on your health - see McVitamins.com
Are you Getting enough Vitamin C to Protect your body from illness and disease?
One of the most important substances in the achievement and preservation of optimum health, as well as the prevention and treatment of disease, is vitamin C.
To appreciate why an optimum daily intake of this nutrient is so essential in the battle against infectious disease and well-being in general, we must remember that our bodies do not make vitamin C.
The question becomes what amount of vitamin C is needed to put a person in the best of health and give them the immune protection against infectious diseases of all kinds, as well as the various degenerative diseases that are now so common.
To help you understand the truth of "what amount," here is what experts in the field of nutrition have to say:
"In order to answer this, we must first understand the concept of Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) as formulated by the Food and Nutrition Board.
"Most people interpret RDA for any particular nutrient (in this case vitamin C) as being that specific dosage that leads to the best health for all people. That is, ‘if I take the RDA of vitamin C every day of my life, I will more than likely achieve the best health that can possibly be gained by the intake of this nutrient.’
"This interpretation is quite false!
"The RDA is only the estimated amount that, for most people, will prevent scurvy or death caused by vitamin C deficiency.
"The board's recommendations were adopted to indicate to the general American public the amount of vitamin C needed [45 mg] in order to avoid scurvy.
"The problem with the board’s recommendations is that the medical profession took hold of them and created a misconception generally accepted by many physicians. This being:
"If there are no signs or symptoms of scurvy, we must assume that there is no deficiency of vitamin C. Therefore no need to take supplements of this vitamin.
"But scurvy is not just a symptom of lack [of vitamin C], but a final collapse, leading to death, via a breakdown and disintegration of our bodies.
"There is a large area, including colds, infections, flu and degenerative diseases that exists between the total blackness of scurvy and death, and the pure white of optimum health and resistance to disease."No longer can we be satisfied with the misconception that if we do not have scurvy, we do not need any additional amounts of vitamin C in order to achieve optimum health and resistance to disease."
Excerpted from Brain Allergies
by William Philpott, M.D. & Dwight Kalita, Ph.D.
Eight double blind studies have been done using between 200 mg/day and 2,000 mg/day, which have shown an average 44% reduction in illness, thus the RDA recommendation of 45 mg of vitamin C is far too low to provide the protection needed today.
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