The Innate Diet Of Grass.....a few random thoughts

Living in the Houston area for 44, almost 45 years, I've seen the summer weather pattern a more than a few times and am quite familiar with it. Typically, June is the wettest of the summer months here, and if it's dry in June, we're likely in for a hot dry summer.

It started out that way here this summer, June was dry. But thanks to our friend Alex (hurricane) we've endured 3 days of heavy rains in the area, and as I type this it is raining hard again. This type of pattern, dry, then wet, makes me think of grass, keeping it alive, figuring out how to make it thrive, watering it etc.

What does that have to do with wellness? Good question of course! Have you ever noticed that when it's dry outside, when we water our grass, it does liven up a bit, and won't die off. However, when a good rain comes through, it seems the grass does even better than an equal amount of watering from our sprinklers. Why would that be? Let's look at that.

First, the innate diet of grass if you will, is rainwater. Rain, from the sky. Not water from a faucet or sprinkler. Plain old water from the clouds. The water in the pipes that feeds our grass is a bit "processed" so to speak. It contains things like chlorine among other possible contaminants (look up water contents and see what you find). So while it does feed our grass and keep it alive, it doesn't do as good of a job as the innate diet of grass. It keeps it alive, but it doesn't thrive.

So what does that have to do with us? We can choose to eat our innate diet or not. If we choose to not eat innately, then we may be choosing to stay alive, and not thrive. If we DO eat innately, then we have a better chance of thriving, and being as healthy as possible ie, living well.

The same goes for all of our lifestyle choices. How well we eat, move, think and rest affects whether or not we'll thrive or just stay alive. Which do you want?

Until next time, BE WELL!

Dr. Bruce

PS, sorry I didn't realize how long it had been since I posted on here!!!!

"You Time".......or "Me Time"

Whatever you want to call it, we all need a little bit of it. What is "it" you say? I call it "Me Time", or if I am telling you to take it, it would be called "You Time".

Today is good Friday, it's 6:55 in the morning. I slept until I felt done. No one is up around here except the cat, who is happy I just fed her, and now I am enjoying the quiet. I am having "Me Time" today. Time to do things I really want to do (even if some of them need to be done). I'll be going to a track in a couple of hours with my entire family to walk/jog for about an hour. I'll be watching my son and one of the catchers on his team practice pitching/catching (My son pitches, the other will catch).

I'll take some time to plant a few things in my front flower beds today. I'll have lunch AND dinner with my family. I'll help clean the house since we are entertaining a few families tomorrow night.

Oh, some of you are saying that sounds like a lot of work for a "Me Time" kinda day. But, the point is, the things I am doing, I really WANT to do, and actually enjoy doing (yes even cleaning, I know, I am a bit weird). Having "Me Time" doesn't mean doing nothing but sitting around vegging, though that can be part of a "Me Time" day. Hey, I might take a nap today. My pastor says sometimes the most spiritual thing one can do is take a nap, and I agree!

The real point is to do what Stephen Covey says when he talks about the 7th habit of highly effective people: Take time to sharpen the saw. Take time to rejuvenate yourself. If all we do is continue cutting down trees, without taking time to sharpen our saw, soon the work becomes harder and harder, and we have to take more and more effort to bring down a tree. Soon, even the smallest saplings that need to come down become a real chore. Our arms become fatigued, our backs, our legs, everything will begin to hurt, we might even injure ourselves because we become mentally fatigued as well and make a mistake with a dangerous tool like a saw.

That's how life is too. We must take time to rejuvenate, we must take "Me Time" regularly, not just when we feel the symptoms of fatigue and burnout, it has to be part of our regular lifestyle plan. If we don't, we'll fatigue, we'll feel like it's a chore to get through event he most mundane of activities. We might hurt ourselves, or others around us because we haven't taken time to rejuvenate, and we don't react to life the way we should.

What would your ideal "Me Day" look like? It doesn't have to look like mine. It has to be what rejuvenates YOU.

Take some time for you, this weekend and regularly.

Until next time...Be Well!

Dr. Bruce

Health Care Is Not Expensive

Got your attention? I bet I did. I know everyone of us are thinking about health care these days, one way or another. My goal today is to tell you how you can be less concerned about what changes are really coming down, and show you how you can have less costs with regards to your health, and, how if we all did this, it would save the country hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions.

First, let’s clarify a couple of things. For starters, when you go to your doctor for an illness, (are you ready for this?) you are NOT receiving health care. That’s right, you heard it here first, it is NOT health care. It is SICK care. It is DISEASE care. You are going there because you are sick, or have a disease. You are there because for some reason, your body has broken down and is not doing what it’s supposed to have done, you body’s function has decreased enough to where an illness has temporarily (hopefully temporarily) won the fight for who is in charge inside you. This is true for the flu, a sinus infection, pneumonia, and diseases such as cardiovascular issues, diabetes, cancer etc. So, you have chosen to go and get some help via medications to suppress said sickness/disease/symptom in the hopes that either your body will kick in again and knock down the issue, or you can at least keep it down to a dull roar.

Please hear me, I am not condemning going to get treated for your disease. It is necessary sometimes. Otherwise, the results could be severe, even fatal. I am reminded of a patient I had a few years ago that didn’t seek care fast enough, and lost the lower ½ of his leg to a diabetic neuropathy. (More on this guy later). I am only trying to get us to think differently about health care vs. sick care or disease management. Remember, the type of thinking that we’ve developed so far in our country with regards to health and wellness has gotten us to where we are now, which is a very sick nation, with rampant obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and many other diseases of lifestyle. That same type of thinking will not get us out of this rut, and will keep us reliant on medications, surgeries, and, of course, insurance plans.

Do you realize that much of our illness/disease in this country is caused by lifestyle decisions? What if we started thinking radically differently about our lifestyles? Obesity, diabetes, stroke, and heart disease are things that cost us directly when we have to deal with it, and indirectly when they reach epidemic levels as they have here in our country. What if we changed that?

Do you realize how much cheaper it would be for us if we only learned how to take better care of ourselves? If our thinking was so radically changed that we no longer tolerated putting toxins in our bodies that are disguised as food, we would chart a totally different course for ourselves, our families and our country regarding health. If we sought out health care providers that focused primarily on lifestyle changes, and supporting us in those endeavors, what would that do for us? If we joined a gym and actually used the membership, or started a walking group, how different could our lives be? It would cost us personally so much less for starters. And it would cost the nation much less too! Follow me here: The sicker we are as a nation, the more we have to use health insurance. The more we have to use health insurance, the less the insurance companies profit. They tend to not like that much, so our premiums go up. When our employers have to pay more in premiums, it cuts into their profits. That loss of profit is usually offset by the company charging the consumer more for their product or service. Do you see how every time one more of us gets sick and has to seek out sick care, it has an impact on the entire country? This doesn’t even count lost productivity because of absent workers! When you look at it in this way, the concept is staggering!!

This is supposed to be a time of “change”, so how can we change this situation? Seek out wellness oriented healthcare providers. Let them work with you in making lifestyle changes that will help you step closer to wellness. This is what we do at our office every day. We teach people what it means to eat better, move better, rest better and think better daily. We set goals for them, we support them as they work through changing 20, 30, 40 years or more of thinking in the old paradigm. It’s fun to see them lose 40 pounds under our supervision and feel “better than ever” as one 60+ year patient told us. It’s exciting to see people’s cholesterol levels normalize. It’s rewarding to hear how a person has learned to deal with stress so much better that they finally feel rested when they wake in the mornings. It IS possible. It IS happening right now. It CAN happen for you, and it would benefit not only you and your family, but our great nation as a whole!

So, back to my diabetic patient with the prosthetic leg. He chose NOT to learn to eat, move, think and rest better, he chose NOT to pursue true health care. I saw him a while back. He’s now in a wheelchair, with BOTH of his legs now removed from the knee down. A very sad story for a young man. A very costly process for him. A huge lesson for us all.

“Health Care” is NOT expensive, “Sick Care” is.

Until next time, BE WELL!

Dr. Bruce

Real Food vs. Edible Food Like Substances

Here's a GREAT article about real food, I LOVE IT!!


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Real Food Challenge Attracts CNN Spotlight
By Kimberly Hartke | Published: March 10, 2010

Vicky @ CNN Headquarters Atlanta GA.
Creative Commons License photo credit: Morales Photo
My Real Food Challenge

by Guest blogger, Jenny McGruther, Nourished Kitchen blog

There’s something revolutionary about real food, something subversive about traditional foods. There shouldn’t be.

Real food, traditional food, is nothing extraordinary. There should be no cultural shock to enjoying fruits and vegetables, grains and beans, milk and meat grown, raised and prepared through the time-honored practices and traditions that nourished human health for millennia. But there is.

Raising animals with true, holistic care and respect to their natural diets and proclivities has been lost to confinement operations. Nurturing and cherishing the soil to optimize the production of heirloom fruits and vegetables has been lost to massive farming operations and mono-cropping. Farm fresh milk, drunk greedily the morning the cow or goat was milked, has been lost to the denaturing effects of ultra-high temperature pasteurization and homogenization. After all it’s to protect our health, isn’t it?


Moreover, we’ve not only lost the art of farming, but also of preparing food with care, attention and appreciation. Where we would have learned time-honored traditions of preparing nourishing foods as we tugged at our grandmother’s aprons, we’ve been taught instead to microwave our suppers and that freshly baked “from scratch” pastries and breads come from a box.

As a result, not only has our health as a nation suffered, but so has our culture. We’ve lost our heritage.

As the traditional foods movement has grown, many of us our muddling our ways through our journeys into real food – rediscovering the lost arts, but it’s a tricky road with no grandmother to hold your hand and show you how to mash the sauerkraut just so, or how to soak flour in buttermilk to make the lightest biscuits.

In early February, I challenged my readers at Nourished Kitchen to clean up their cupboards and reinvigorate their passion for real and traditional foods; moreover, my goal was to introduce the practices and fundamental aspects of traditional foods to an audience who so desperately wanted to learn what modern agriculture and food processing forgot.

So we made it happen – over 950 of us. I made the claim that real health comes from real food and that real food never comes from a box as I brazenly suggested that participants rid their pantries of processed foods: white flour, white sugar, refined vegetable oils and – gasp! – even agave nectar. I asked participants to make meals of vegetables and grass-fed meats and properly prepared whole grain. Every day there was a new assignment, new learning and a new goal.

We learned to sprout, sour and soak our way through phytic acid with the best of them. We lovingly tended to and babied our sourdough starters – celebrated when they rose high and wept when they failed. We made cheese – some the easy way with fresh yogurt and others were more adventurous. We ate our carrots and peas with butter, real butter, and we ate our fresh greens with plenty of olive oil. We relished our meat, eggs , fish, broth and even liver. And we washed it all down with sour, sweet and effervescent draughts of home-brewed kombucha.

Most importantly, we learned to give back to our communities: our farmers markets had more volunteers; our food banks found fresh, real foods, at their steps. A non-profit or two may have even found new members and donations to support their good work protecting farmers rights and supporting nutrition advocacy and education.

Eventually, what we were doing – over 900 of us on the challenge – caught the ear of a CNN reporter who covered the 28-day Real Food Challenge and Nourished Kitchen on CNN Health. And that is how liver and lard landed on the homepage of CNN.com.

It shocked many of CNN’s readers. After all, how could lard be good for you?!? How could someone, in this day and age, seriously advocate eating meat!?! My goodness, you’ll have to pry the Cheetohs from my cold, dead hands.

A nutritionist, who may well have benefited from taking the challenge herself, even touted the benefits of processed foods like low-fat milk and canned green beans, while those tried-and-true challenge participants scoffed.

Sure, the challenge wasn’t without its … well … challenges as addressed by the article on CNN. For many families, especially those previously unfamiliar with traditional foods and the Weston A Price Foundation, the challenge was struggle. Some families had never prepared a meal without the aid of a package or a box before embarking on the challenge. Others found the expense of real food a shock – though it can be easily mitigate through proper kitchen management. Yet everyone, no matter where they succeeded or where they struggled, learned.

Now that the challenge has ended, it still effects its goal. Participants found their passion for all-natural, real foods and many of them are still choosing to continue on the path of traditional foods. Moreover, others have emailed me to let me know their migraine headaches disappeared, that their ever constant gastrointestinal distress has ended and still others have expressed that after months or years without a menstrual cycle, their cycles have returned.

Real food truly brings health, not only for our bodies but for our culture and for our nation’s foodsheds.

Jennifer McGruther, a mother and farmers market manager in Crested Butte, Colorado, blogs about real food and the value of growing your foodshed at Nourished Kitchen where she features many nourishing recipes, publishes monthly recipe cards and feature articles on the real and traditional foods movement. If you’re interested you can also sign up for the next round of the 28-day Real Food Challenge or get involved at Nourished Kitchen.

Mercury In High Fructose Corn Syrup?

Yes, still another reason to avoid the toxic HFCS. Just read this article from January last year in the Washington Post. Here are a few quotes from it:

MONDAY, Jan. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies.

HFCS has replaced sugar as the sweetener in many beverages and foods such as breads, cereals, breakfast bars, lunch meats, yogurts, soups and condiments. On average, Americans consume about 12 teaspoons per day of HFCS, but teens and other high consumers can take in 80 percent more HFCS than average.

"Mercury is toxic in all its forms. Given how much high-fructose corn syrup is consumed by children, it could be a significant additional source of mercury never before considered. We are calling for immediate changes by industry and the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] to help stop this avoidable mercury contamination of the food supply," the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's Dr. David Wallinga, a co-author of both studies, said in a prepared statement.

Go Green Day

I have been getting a lot of interest in our NanoGreens products, we will be putting our own testimonials together soon, but here are some from around the country at this link: (The link won't post????) http://www.biopharmasci.com/hp/sng/testimonials.asp (copy and paste to your browser)

Join us for our "Go Green" day on March 17 to get sample tastes of all of our Nano products (NanoGreens, NanoReds, NanoPro, NanOmega3), fruit smoothies and my special concoction of juiced apple/carrot/kale and ginger!

Come see how easy it can be to start "Being Well"!!

Until next time....Be Well!

Dr. Bruce

Why A Fruit and Vegetable Supplement?

Why should someone start taking a fruit/vegetable supplement? That's a fair question. Just what is up with the recommendations of servings of fruits and vegetables? Why are there minimum standards, and why are there optimum recommendations that are different? Let's take a look at this whole idea here.

First, 100 years ago, at the turn of the 20th century, our grandparents, great grandparents etc had a certain lifestyle. That lifestyle had more deaths from what we now consider treatable diseases such as infections from cuts and other illnesses. Now however, the death tolls for the current generation have more to do with diseases of lifestyle, meaning diseases that we bring on ourselves due to our way of living (this includes eating, resting, mental health and exercise). Now our health issues with things such as heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and many cancers are significantly higher than 100 years ago. Is that because suddenly, in the span of 2 generations our genes have changed that much? I am sure you would agree that the reason is probably not found in sudden DNA changes in that short period of time.

What is different in how the older generation ate, compared to how we eat now? Well one of the easiest answers would be fast food, but let's not spend time jumping on the mega doses of McD's that we take in these days. Instead, let's look at what's missing. The former generation in general did NOT have the amount of pre-packaged foods that we have. Almost all they ate was fresh food. Recently killed meats, recently picked fruits and recently picked vegetables were the order of the day. Prepackaged dinners? Never heard of them at that point. Foods that would keep forever on our shelves? Not even a thought in their lives. Today though, those are the order of the day in our generation. How much nutritional punch do those types of foods have? None, at least none in the positive sense of the word. The nutritional punch they DO have is unhealthy, filled with preservatives (read chemicals) and the like. How many things on an ingredients list of the prepackaged foods can you no pronounce? Probably quite a few! That's a good indication that it's not a healthy substance, not real food, and quite toxic over the long haul in your life.

So that's part of the equation, we've replaced too many of the fresh, real foods in our lives with non nutritional, toxic junk, that eventually poisons our systems enough to cause early death (the current generation of children is the first expected to NOT outlive their parents in age). Fruits and vegetables are the foods filled with substances that are amazingly powerful. There are too many to name, but understand that they do things such as lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, fight off infections, fight off cancers, fight obesity and more. Doesn't that sound like the perfect remedy for all of the diseases of lifestyle we are suffering from? Doesn't it sound better than turning to a plethora of medications (chemicals) to try to get healthy after we've begun to get ill? Wouldn't THAT be considered real HEALTH CARE vs. Sick Care?

That is what we have in the power of fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, it is too easy to eat the other junk. It's cheaper too, but ONLY in the short run. In reality it is cheaper to stay healthy than it is to pay for sickness care, and it's cheaper for the whole nation if we are a healthier nation not depending on drugs and surgery to stay alive. Keep that in mind when comparing a frozen pizza to the ingredients you need to bake chicken, make a salad and cook up some veggies.

But even if we know it's better, it's hard to eat 5 or more fruits and veggies a day. And even so, much of the fruit and vegetables consumed may be have toxins involved due to fertilizing and pesticide spraying in the growing of them. Organic would obviously be the best choice, but that can be even more expensive (farmers markets are the best place to get locally grown organic fruits and veggies for the price). Studies show that for OPTIMUM health, to deal with all the toxins that get in our body regularly in our western culture, we need more like 8-10 multi colored and varied fruits and vegetables a day. Jeeez, the good news keeps getting harder and harder doesn't it?

That's where a fruit and vegetable supplement comes in such as the NanoGreens and NanoReds we carry at our office. In one scoop, the equivalent of 8-10 servings of ORGANIC fruits and veggies are consumed, for less than $2.00 per scoop. Double blind studies in two different colleges (the most recent at the University of Miami) show that Nanogreens produce enough healthy punch to lower the blood pressure in those with hypertension enough to be equal with a person having been put on a anti-hypertensive medication. Again, is it better to get lower your blood pressure artificially with chemicals, or would it be better to do it more naturally? I think you know the answer. Food is the best medicine we can take.

We'll have a "Go Green Day" on the greenest day of the year, St. Patricks Day (March 17) this year. Free taste testing samples will be given out that day, and all the Nano products will be discounted that day. Door prizes will be drawn for at the end of the day too. If you're in our area, make plans to stop by between 9-noon or 3-7 pm that day and experience Nanogreens or NanoReds and our Superfood Solution Shake!

www.superfoodsolution.com

Until next time, Be Well!

Dr. Bruce