Health Basics: Why are fried foods terrible for your health?

Fried foods damage your body and brain in many different ways, and it’s not just a long term consequence, but a short term detriment as well. Just as a car needs good clean oil to run efficiently and not break down, your body needs food that can be digested properly…

How to test for metals poisoning and remove heavy metals from your body

(NaturalNews) With all the recent news about iron pills that might harm you (http://www.naturalnews.com/034021_iron_supplements_harmful.html) and a popular dietary supplement that was exposed as having surprisingly high levels of aluminum sulfate (http://www.naturalnews.com/034005_Adya_Clarity_consumer_alert.html), NaturalNews has received numerous emails from readers wanting to know how to actually remove heavy metals (and light metals, for that matter) from their body. On top of the items mentioned above, there is also aluminum and mercury in many vaccines (http://www.naturalnews.com/031870_flu_shots_brain_damage.html), and people take in mercury from eating sushi, too (http://www.naturalnews.com/029189_sushi_mercury.html). There’s also a problem with copper exposure , as people who take in too much copper may literally lose their minds or become delusional (http://www.naturalnews.com/034037_Adya_Clarity_aluminum.html). The bottom line in all this is that we are being assaulted with heavy metals through medicines, personal care products, cosmetics, industrial chemicals and even some fraudulently marketed health products. So what can you do about it? Step one: Get tested – blood, hair, urine Before you can treat metals toxicity, you need to determine what levels of metals you actually have contaminating your body’s tissues. As metals toxicity expert Roy Dittman explained in our recent interview, a blood test alone cannot accurately determine your level of metals toxicity . Many metals quickly pass from your blood to your tissues , where they may lodge and cause serious long-term health problems such as: • Iron lodged in your heart tissue can cause heart disease. • Aluminum lodged in your brain tissue can cause Alzheimer’s or clinical insanity. • Mercury lodged in your brain can cause autism spectrum disorders. • Lead lodged in your bones can interfere with red blood cell production and even white blood cell production. To get tested, find a local doctor or naturopath who can run these tests and offer you an intelligent diagnosis. Get your tests done, review your results, then decide your next course of action. Step two: Consider treatment to remove the metals The most widely accepted treatment for removing heavy metals is chelation therapy , and its efficacy for certain metals is widely accepted across both conventional and holistic medical practitioners. Chelation therapy involves your doctor or naturopath placing an IV line into your arm (or other location), then dripping a chelation agent into your bloodstream. The most common chelation agent used today is ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid or EDTA. As the University of Maryland Medical Center explains (http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/ethylenediaminetetraacetic-acid-000302.htm): “Chelation therapy using EDTA is the medically accepted treatment for lead poisoning. Other heavy metal poisonings treated with chelation include mercury, arsenic, aluminum, chromium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, selenium, zinc, tin, and thallium. Chelating agents other than EDTA are also used to clear several of these substances from the bloodstream.” This page goes on to explain: “Heavy metal toxicity in humans has been associated with many health conditions, including heart disease, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Alzheimer’s disease, immune system disorders, gastrointestinal disorders (including irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS), and autism.” Be sure to replenish the good minerals Although there is tremendous controversy about the use of EDTA for removing plaque from arteries, it is widely acknowledged that EDTA very effectively removes metals (and minerals) from the body. The good news is that EDTA binds to heavy metals and allows your body to easily eliminate them. The bad news is that EDTA also binds to beneficial minerals such as zinc and calcium, taking them out of your body as well. For this reason, health practitioners who administer EDTA chelation typically recommend remineralization treatments with healthful minerals following chelation. There are many other areas to explore in the realm of metals detox. I don’t have all the answers for you here, but you may wish to explore various detox cleanses using apple cider vinegar or lemon juice as the primary liquids. Just “juicing” fresh vegetables and fruits with lemons is, all by itself, somewhat of a heavy metals detox (although it probably won’t eliminate inorganic metals lodged in brain tissue). We hope to bring you more stories on this topic in the near future, especially as so many people have a heightened interest in removing copper, aluminum, mercury and even excess iron from their bodies. Eliminating excess iron, by the way, is easily accomplished by donating blood . But make sure you get tested first, and discuss treatment options with your doctor or naturopathic physician. This is one topic in which even conventional doctors may have very practical knowledge. Although conventional doctors typically have a poor understanding of nutrition, removing heavy metals from your body is an area in which they may indeed be quite useful. Licensed naturopaths are also an outstanding resource for this. How to get “good” minerals into your body It’s simpler than you think: Simply feed minerals to your plants , then eat the plants. You can do this seasonally with a home garden or year-round with a sprouting machine. The sprouts will take up inorganic minerals and convert them into organic minerals which are then compatible for human consumption. Obviously, make sure the minerals you feed your plants don’t contain harmful metals (like mercury or cadmium), or else your plants will absorb those, too. Never consume inorganic minerals or metals (i.e. minerals made from rocks) if you can avoid it. Certain metals should always be avoided where possible, such as mercury, aluminum, cadmium, arsenic and lead.

Heal yourself in 15 days by listening to your body’s cries for help

(NaturalNews) Continuing with our 15-day self-healing series, today we’re going to shift focus inward. This chapter on self-healing is about learning how to listen to your body and understand what it’s really trying to tell you. In medicine, the word “symptoms” is thrown around as if it were something bad. Doctors talk about the “symptoms of disease” and then they prescribe chemicals to suppress those symptoms. If you have pain, they prescribe painkillers. If you have high blood pressure, they prescribe chemicals to artificially lower blood pressure. This practice of detecting and then suppressing symptoms is called “mainstream medicine.” But what if that entire approach were wrong? What if symptoms were gifts rather than curses? What if the messages they were sending actually contained important information about your health? That’s exactly what you’re about to learn here (if you don’t already know this, that is): Symptoms are messengers… cries for help from your body. And learning how to listen to those messages rather than suppressing them may be the key to unlocking your greatest health potential. Medications dull your body and mind Conventional medical doctors have been trained that symptoms are things to be suppressed, negated or destroyed. These doctors don’t consider symptoms to be a holistic part of your healing experience, but that’s in fact exactly what they are. If you sprain your ankle playing frisbee, for example, your body sends you a pain message. This message contains important information: “This tissue is injured. Do not use it until it is repaired.” If you heed the message, you will allow your ankle time to heal. Once it’s healed and safe to use again, the pain will disappear. It is now safe to put weight on your ankle again. In this context, pain is an intelligent regulator of your activities. It can direct you to avoid further injury. But pain killers dull the pain and artificially block the pain messages. They allow you to keep playing on an injured ankle to the point where you are likely to cause further injury, resulting in even more suffering and perhaps permanent damage that cannot be healed. That’s why pain is something to be listened to, not ignored. But pain isn’t the only messenger you’ll want to pay attention to… What your skin and nails are telling you Your skin is also a messenger. What’s happening with your skin is a reflection of what’s happening with your internal organs. If you have acne on your face, for example, you have much the same thing happening in your digestive tract. Facial acne is a sign to clean up your diet, eliminate all animal products for a while (dairy, meat, etc.) and detox with a plant-based diet. If your skin is dry, itchy or flaky, it’s a sure sign that you’re deficient in omega-3 fatty acids and possibly some other key vitamins or nutrients. Increase your intake of omega-3s through fish oils, marine oils or plant-based sources like chia seeds, and add superfoods to your diet to cover any vitamin deficiencies you may have. Your fingernails can tell a lot about your health, too: Misshapen or discolored fingernails point to chronic nutritional deficiencies in minerals and certain vitamins. If your fingernails have ridges, cracking, discoloration or any other symptoms, get yourself to a naturopathic physician right away. Fingernails, you see, indicate what’s going on with the rest of your body because your nails are, of course, grown out of your body. If you have nutritional deficiencies or chronic organ problems, they will be revealed in your nails. Your tongue can tell a wealth about your health, too. Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners use tongue diagnosis (and pulse diagnosis) to assess symptoms and clues about what’s happening with your internal organ health. Tongue diagnosis is remarkably accurate: A tongue that’s discolored, has a layer of mucous, has deep ridges on the sides or other non-healthy characteristics directly indicates problems with your liver, kidneys, heart, lungs or digestive tract. If you’re curious about this, seek out a TCM practitioner for a tongue and pulse diagnosis. Sadly, American TCM practitioners have a watered-down approach where they are afraid to offer any medical diagnosis for fear of being arrested by state medical authorities, but in China, an experienced TCM practitioner can tell you more about your health from a simple diagnosis than you would typically learn from an MRI. What goes in must come out To pay even closer attention to your body’s symptoms, observe what’s coming out of your body: • Do you have body odor? If so, your diet is unclean. Too much milk, butter and meat. • Does your breath smell bad? Same problem: Unclean diet or poor digestive health. • Are your stools too hard, too soft or not healthy looking? Check with a naturopath — the health of your stools indicates the health of your digestion. • Does your urine smell strange? It will after eating asparagus, of course, but normally your urine should not have an offensive odor. If it does, go visit a naturopathic physician for some advice. • Are you hyperventilating at times? It may be a sign of consuming a diet that’s too acidic. Or could also mean pre-diabetes. Check with a naturopath. What comes out of your body, you see, is a very accurate indication of what’s going on inside your body. Did you know that physicians actually used to taste the urine of patients? They could diagnose disease just from tasting the urine. Of course, these days mainstream doctors don’t taste your urine anymore. Instead, they give you expensive urine by pumping you full of HRT drugs, psych meds and other expensive pharmaceuticals that you pee down the drain while you’re literally flushing your money away. Listen to your cravings Your body will also tell you what it wants through cravings . These are little subconscious messengers that direct you to eat something your body needs. Most people, however, misinterpret those cravings and end up eating something bad for their health instead of what the body actually craves. For example, if your body craves salt — real salt, not the processed sodium found in junk foods — you may feel an urge to eat a salty snack food. But that urge is often just a craving for full-spectrum salt. Try eating some fresh nuts dusted with full-spectrum sea salt and see if that takes care of your craving. Cravings for chocolate may often be just your body crying out for magnesium . Your body sends you the message, “Eat more magnesium!” but your conscious mind mistakenly thinks you just need more chocolate. The problem is that most of the processed, store-bought chocolate on the market today is overly processed and has little or no magnesium left in it. Buy real chocolate if you want it to contain the minerals it’s supposed to. Is your body crying out for water? Dehydration can cause all sorts of symptoms that are often misdiagnosed as other diseases. Chronic dehydration can appear as all the following symptoms or diseases: Asthma, high blood pressure, hunger, kidney disorders, heart problems and constipation. Drinking more water on a regular basis (and avoiding dehydrating beverages such as sodas) can solve these underlying problems, and you may actually see many of those symptoms vanish within a few days, weeks or months. What’s beneath the symptom? If you do go see a regular mainstream doctor, you may in fact receive a quite useful diagnosis of specific symptoms. Western doctors are quite good at determining what’s wrong with you on a superficial level even if they have no idea about underlying causes. So if you receive a diagnosis from a western doctor, you can often take that diagnosis home and do something useful with it. For example, if your doctor says you have high blood pressure and recommends you start taking toxic blood pressure drugs, the best thing you can do for your health is tear up the prescription, go seek a naturopathic physician and ask what you can do to resolve the underlying causes of high blood pressure rather than trying to artificially medicate yourself with chemicals. Chances are, you have various nutritional deficiencies (lack of omega-3s, often), combined with dehydration and poor dietary choices. Correcting those three things will often resolve blood pressure symptoms. Of course, your specific case may be different, so be sure to check with your naturopathic physician about what’s best for you. Use the symptom as information Never be tricked into taking a medication that masks the symptom. Use the symptom as a clue to look for root causes that can be corrected through more holistic, natural means. This is how you can listen to your body and interpret its messages in useful ways that lead you in the direction of health. It takes no intelligence whatsoever to mask symptoms with medications. Any fool can accomplish that by popping pills, much to the delight of pharmacies and drug companies. But an intelligent, mature person will listen to their body’s many messages (symptoms) and learn from them to discover what’s really going on with their health. Masking symptoms, in other words, is a childish, adolescent approach to medicine. But listening and learning from symptoms in order to take a more holistic approach to health is characteristic of an intelligent adult. Which approach will you decide to take? Previous articles in this 15-day “Heal Yourself” series Part One – Remove barriers to healing http://www.naturalnews.com/028053_self_healing_quality_of_life.html Part Two – Unleash your inner healing potential http://www.naturalnews.com/028060_self_healing_immune_system.html Part Three – You are what you absorb http://www.naturalnews.com/028067_self_healing_digestion.html Part Four – Transform your health by making new blood http://www.naturalnews.com/028075_blood_health_transformation.html Part Five – Experience the healing potential of living plant juices http://www.naturalnews.com/028100_self_healing_fresh_juice.html Part Six – Accelerate your healing with a 24-hour fast http://www.naturalnews.com/028117_self_healing_fasting.html Part Seven – Heal yourself by rejecting the mainstream crowd http://www.naturalnews.com/028136_self_healing_crowd_psychology.html Part Eight – Stop making disease http://www.naturalnews.com/028153_self_healing_disease.html Part Nine – Correct your nature deficiency http://www.naturalnews.com/028203_nature_deficiency_self_healing.html Part Ten – Protect your skin exposures http://www.naturalnews.com/028249_skin_health_consumer_products.html Part Eleven – Eat MORE, not less http://www.naturalnews.com/028298_superfoods_self_healing.html Part Twelve – The Attitude of Gratitude http://www.naturalnews.com/028399_gratitude_self_healing.html Part Thirteen – Secrets of Social Healing http://www.naturalnews.com/028456_self_healing_family.html Part Fourteen – How to make exercise fun http://www.naturalnews.com/028531_exercise_outdoors.html