by Kathleen Barnes

I know our world is moving faster than most of us like, and now it’s time to be concerned about the way our children are growing up too quickly in the physical sense.

The average American girl now reaches menarche (the onset of menstrual periods, signaling puberty) a full 18 months earlier than girls of just 50 years ago.

A landmark 1997 study of 17,000 girls startled parents with its findings that nearly 7 percent of white girls and 27 percent of African-American girls start developing breasts by age 7. That’s during second grade!

Alarmingly early puberty

In fact, pediatricians are no longer alarmed about breast tissue growth among girls under the age of 2.

I was appalled when I discovered my then 21-month old granddaughter was developing a breast! Her pediatrician told my daughter this is “fairly common” among little girls. But in girls who were not yet even two years old? I was horrified. If it is common, it is even more alarming because it certainly is not normal.

Endocrine disruptors

Many experts theorize that this condition, which now has a medical name: precocious puberty, is caused by xenoestrogens. These are toxins that act like estrogen in the human body and unbalance the delicate dance of hormones. They’re also known as endocrine disruptors.

Many of these hormone disruptors are petrochemical-based and have been found in a multitude of common household plastics, including water bottles, toddlers’ toys and fid packaging. They’re also found in pesticides, dioxin, food dyes and preservatives even in common cosmetics.

Phthalates

Among the most dangerous xenoestrogens are called phthalates (pronounced THAL-aytz) that soften plastics.

We are all exposed to them all the time. They have also worked their way into the water supply by becoming airborne (as in industrial air pollutants) or through agricultural chemicals leeching through the ground.

Growth hormones injected into dairy cattle have brought hormone disruptors into our milkstream and, to a certain degree, into our meat supply.

These xenoestrogens became part of our environment about 70 years ago.

Reproductive disruption

Their effects have been profound. Xenoestrogens disrupt the process of reproduction, causing low sperm count in boys and early puberty in girls. Phthalates are also known to increase the risk of breast cancer.

Prevention is the best path. Here are a few suggestions:

Go organic with dairy: Organic dairy products are a must for all children who have been weaned from breast milk. The hormonal risks and those posed by the antibiotics used in non-organic dairy operations are daunting.

Go organic entirely, if you can: This is not just for kids, it’s for all ages. The harsh chemicals used in food production, processing and preservation are immensely harmful to everyone’s health. If your budget will tolerate it, buy as many organic products as possible,from your meats to your fruits, vegetables, grains, cleaning products and even cosmetics and personal care items like soap and shampoo.

Eliminate pesticides and herbicides from your lawn: The vast majority of these toxic chemicals consumed in America today are used by homeowners and they are often used incorrectly. If you must use them, follow all the precautions, wear gloves and masks and measure precisely the amounts you need. Store them safely and away from your house, garden and water supply.

Banish plastic from your house: I know. This is nearly impossible. But as much as possible, don’t buy food packaged in plastic because the phthalates leech into the food, especially in meat that is packaged on Styrofoam trays and wrapped in plastic wrap. Don’t drink out of plastic cups and don’t let your kids do so either. Never heat food in a microwave in plastic containers because that accelerates the phthalate leeching. While you’re at it, get rid of any Teflon-coated cookware. At high heats it offgasses harmful chemicals known to cause various types of cancer. Opt instead for cast iron, or better yet, porcelain-coated cast iron.

Banish plastic and Styrofoam from your life as much as you can. I’m specifically talking about drinking hot liquids out of Styrofoam cups like that lovely latte at your favorite java house. The fumes from hot liquid interacting with petrochemical-based Styrofoam are toxic—and you’re putting the cup to your mouth, so you inhale them with every sip!

Avoid bottled water for the same reasons: Not only is the waste a burden on the environment, the plastic bottle leeches phthalates into the water you’re drinking. The leeching is accelerated if the bottle is left in a warm place, like your car or your gym bag. Opt for a good water filter at home and carry your water with you in glass or stainless steel containers that won’t leech.

Protecting yourself from xenoestrogens as much as possible is important for every human being, but it is especially crucial for children and women of all ages.

Turn Back Your Body’s Clock

by Kathleen Barnes

Imagine having all the energy you need to get through your busiest day – and then some. Imagine slipping into a form-fitting dress for a party and not having to worry about lumps and bulges. Imagine waking up in the morning feeling refreshed, alert, pain-free and happy to greet a new day and actually seeing a younger, brighter face in the mirror.

If it’s been years or even decades since you felt or looked that way, you’re not alone. But now animal studies presented to the National Academy of Sciences suggest a supplement combination can bring it all back, giving you the skin, the brain metabolism and the energy you haven’t enjoyed since your youth.

Speed weight loss and more

The supplements are acetyl l-carnitine (also known as Alcar) and alpha lipoic acid or ALA. They’re already well-known in the nutritional health community and they’ve been the subject of extensive human research that shows Alcar speeds weight loss and boosts the body’s ability to burn fat for energy and ALA is one of the most potent anti-oxidants and disease-fighters ever discovered.

But put them together, experts say, and they may literally turn back the hands of time by rejuvenating the mitochondria, the tiny “furnaces” inside of every cell in your body. Mitochondria provides 99% of the energy that keeps us alive and healthy, but over time, the little furnaces get damaged and burn fuel less efficiently, releasing free radicals, making us more likely to show signs of aging, disease and deterioration.

Boost energy

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley tried out the Fountain of Youth combo on aging rats: “With the two supplements together, these old rats got up and did the Macarena,” says UC cell biologist Bruce Ames, Ph.D., one of the nation’s most eminent scientists and chief researcher on the ALA/Alcar combo. “The brain looks better, they are full of energy. Everything we looked at looks like a young animal.”

Dr. Ames and his colleagues are in the early stages of human studies on the combo, but they say the signs are good that what works in animals also works on humans.

Try ALA and carnitine to:

Keep you going and going and going:

Dr. Ames’ conducted one small human study that showed half the older men who took the combo for just five weeks reported feeling better, with more vigor and a greater felling of well-being. His animal research shows that mammals lose approximately half of their mitochondrial function as they age, but taking the miracle combo for just a month boosted the mitochondrial activity by about 50%, increasing the distance they were able to walk and their speed of movement dramatically. He also found that old rats only moved about one-third as often as young ones, not because of pain or inability to move, but simply because their metabolisms had slowed down.

Again, the miracle combo to the rescue: In just a month, the animals doubled their activity levels. What’s happening, Dr. Ames theorizes, is a dramatic reduction in the mitochondria’s ability to produce free radicals, which cause the aging process and a host of age-related diseases including heart disease, cancer, arthritis and diabetes.

While Dr. Ames doesn’t claim to have discovered the Fountain of Youth, it may be the Fountain of Middle Age, he laughs. His animal studies were “the equivalent of making a 75- to 80-year-old person look and act middle-aged,” he says.

Sharpen your memory

Alcar has been proven to promote overall brain wellness and slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease because of its powerhouse effects on the mitochondria. Now Dr. Ames’ animal research proves the miracle combo reduced the time required to do simple memory task by more than half and put the young rats and old rats on an almost equal mental level. Human studies are needed, says Dr. Ames, but these results suggest the aging process can actually be reversed.

Erase the signs of aging

ALA alone is considered one of the most effective skin smoothers you can take, says dermatologist Nicholas Perricone, M.D., author of The Wrinkle Cure, who calls ALA “the universal antioxidant.”

Research shows it helps pump up collagen, prevents sun damage and actually repairs the skin damage you’ve already sustained. Dr. Perricone’s research shows that ALA creams erased puffiness in just a day or two, shrank enlarged pores in as little as two weeks, almost completely erased fine lines around the eyes within as little as four weeks and decreased the depth of deep facial lines in as little as eight weeks.

While no research has been conducted on the effects of the ALA/Alcar combo on skin, researchers say each of the ingredients enhances the other for a “synergistic effect, so it stands to reason that this would work at least as well, or even better than either one of the ingredients alone.”

Improve fat-burning

Chinese research shows that l-carnitine promotes fat burning in a dramatic way: overweight young women who took one gram of carnitine a day for 12 weeks lost a whopping 11 pounds, compared those who simply ate a healthy diet and got moderate exercise!

“Carnitine is the forklift that takes fat to the fat incinerators in our cells called the mitochondria, where it’s magically transformed into energy,” says Boulder, CO carnitine researcher and nutritionist Robert Crayhon, M.S., author of The Carnitine Miracle. Alcar is an enhanced form (more biologically active) of l-carnitine, and, again, thought the combination has not yet been studied, researchers says the ALA helps burn glucose and Alcar helps burn fat, so the two together have extra impetus to help you lose weight.

What to take

You can buy ALA and Alcar separately at any health food store. Dr. Ames recommends going for a high quality supplement and taking 500 mg of Alcar and 200 mg of ALA twice a day.

Be sure you’re getting acetyl l-carnitine for the maximum benefits.

By Kathleen Barnes

If I found myself stranded on a desert island, I’d have the assurance of an unlimited source of the healthiest food I could imagine: Omega-3 fatty acids and high quality protein from wild caught fish. Add a few tropical fruits and I could probably live a long and healthy life on my desert island.

Of course, if I am lucky enough to find myself far away from the “civilized world,” I improve my chances of finding fish free of toxins.

Fish may just be the stuff of life. Its healthy fats are essential to optimal cardiovascular function, joint health, brain function and blood sugar metabolism, just to mention a few of its multitude of benefits.

Sadly, most of the fish available on North American markets comes from fish farms which are little more than cesspools of toxic sludge that not only pollute our waterways, but pollute our bodies when we consume them.

They’re completely unsustainable as well Salmon are carnivorous, so it takes 2.2 pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon. Fish farming is rapidly depleting wild fish populations.

Fish farms produce about one-third of the world’s seafood, most notably nearly all the catfish and trout and half of the shrimp and salmon so important to human nutrition.

It’s cheap: Farmed salmon can be $4 to $5 a pound cheaper than wild-caught salmon, but the price is too high in terms of our health and to the health of our environment and wild fish populations.

Toxic mash

In a landmark 2002 study, Canadian researchers found that a single serving of farmed salmon contains three to six times the World Health Organization’s daily intake limit for dioxin and PCBs.
PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), chemicals once used in the manufacture of electrical and heating equipment, paints, plastics, rubbers, dyes and many other substances, were banned in 1977 after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency called them “probable human carcinogens.”

However, PCBs are still present in water, soil, aid and food supplies.
In its Dec. 26, 2005 issue, U.S. News and World Report reported that farmed salmon are raised on fish pellets derived from local fish that often contaminated with PCBs.

The study in the November 2005 issue of the Journal of Nutrition reports that contaminant levels in farmed salmon from certain regions increase the risk of cancer enough to outweigh benefits.

The study showed that farmed salmon from South America, specifically Chile, had the lowest level of pollutants, followed by those form North America. Europe had the highest level, according to David Carpenter, co-author of the study and director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany’s School of Public Health. Pacific wild salmon also has some contaminants from the natural environment, specifically mercury, but these are at a low enough level that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Mercury can be a big problem with farmed fish. Purdue University nutritionists found that eating as little as one fish sandwich from farmed fish weekly could give a 60-kg. adult a 40% of the safe maximum mercury exposure.

Fish farms are most often composed of huge net enclosures in the open sea. Disease is rampant in these crowded pens.

Large quantities of chemicals are used in aquaculture, including antibiotics, pesticides, hormones, anesthetics, vitamins, minerals and anti-parasitical substances most often dumped directly into the ocean waters.

Not only are these potentially toxic substances incorporated into the tissues of the farmed fish, tides and even simple wave action sweep these chemicals out of the nets and into the open seas.

The use of antibiotics is particularly hazardous to the health of human beings and fish since it promotes the spread of antibiotic resistance.
Farmers dose their captive fish with a potent anti-parasitic drug called ivermectin, to rid them of sea lice and known to kill some species of shrimp.

Damage to the environment

Within a few years after large scale fish farming operations began in Canada, shrimp fishermen began pulling up traps full of a deadly mixture of feces, excess antibiotic –laden fish feed and decayed salmon carcasses that had drifted out of the pens.

It’s estimated that one single pen of 200,000 fish produces as much fecal waste as a city of 25,000 people.

In British Columbia, many inlets are caged off for huge Atlantic salmon farms. Although fish farmers assure that they have contained these genetically modified fish with voracious appetites to encourage fast growth, an estimated 40,000 to 1 million have escaped.

Biologists have found Atlantis salmon from the farms in 77 British Columbian streams. When these super-fish get into the wild, they compete unfairly for food resources, causing an increased rate of starvation among wild fish,” wrote Bruce Barcott in a December 2001 article in Mother Jones magazine.

Yet business is booming for fish farmers. Stricter environmental regulations in Norway have pushed fish farming operators to the Western hemisphere. In early 2002, the Canadian government lifted its seven-year moratorium on expanding fish farms in British Columbia. By 2003, there were 85 fish farms in operation in British Columbia and 90 applications pending. The government has stated its intention to quadruple the province’s salmon production by 2013.

Part of the allure of fish farming is to reduce the pressure on the world’s oceans, but that may be wishful thinking. Fish farming is an inefficient means of producing protein. A Feb. 6, 2003 article in The Christian Science Monitor notes that raising carnivorous fish like salmon and shrimp may actually reduce the numbers of wild fish since it takes 2.2 pounds of ground-up fish to make a pound of farmed salmon.

Answer: Avoid most fish

Yet there seems to be a Gordian knot around fish consumption – and the very experts on whom we rely for the best possible information are sending us mixed messages about the best way to get the healthy fats fish provides.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sets much more lenient toxin levels than does its kissing cousin, the Environmental Protection Agency. Most experts recommend being even more conservative about toxin exposure and some advise avoiding fish altogether.

Despite nutritionists extolling the virtues of high fish consumption, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration strongly recommends limiting the amount of fish we eat. The health advisory issued in March 2004 does not distinguish between farm-raised and wild-caught fish.

Let’s face it: Nearly all fish contains some level of mercury.

The FDA recommends that all women who are pregnant, may become pregnant, nursing mothers and young children abstain completely from shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish because of the high levels of mercury contamination that may be particularly harmful to unborn babies and the developing nervous system of young children.
The FDA advisory recommends weekly consumption of no more than 12 ounces of fish and shellfish lower in mercury, including shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon, pollock and catfish.

It also advises keeping up to date on local fish safety warnings and, if there is no advisory available, not to eat more than six ounces of local-caught fish weekly.

Yet many of us are still getting too much mercury—some of it due to the 40 tons of mercury released into the atmosphere annually by coal-fired power plants.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a study in November 2005 that showed fully six percent of U.S. women of childbearing age had mercury levels above the levels that could put them at risk for nervous system defects.

Natural health advocate Joseph Mercola, D.O., says several more fish should be added to the list of fish to avoid, including tuna steaks, sea bass, oysters from the Gulf of Mexico, marlin, halibut, pike, walleye, white croaker and largemouth bass and urges the FDA to expand the list of fish to be avoided and those acceptable for limited consumption.

“I now warn my patients against consuming any fish, whether farm-raised or naturally-caught: fish of all varieties from any waters are now showing dangerously high levels of the tasteless, but highly toxic metal, mercury,” says Mercola.

from
Michelle Schoffro Cook, DNM, DAc, CNC

Do you suffer from cellulite or fatty deposits? Do you experience aches and pains? Are you overweight? Do you experience abdominal bloating? Do you feel bloated or have areas on your body that seem pudgy? Have you been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, lupus, or other chronic immune system disorder? Have you ever yo-yo dieted? Do you experience eye puffiness? Do you experience 2 or more cold or flu viruses yearly? Have you experienced breast cancer?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, your lymphatic system may be sluggish.This system is possibly the most neglected cleansing and healing system in the body, yet it is intensely powerful. It is a complex network of fluid-filled nodes, glands, and tubes tht bathe our cells and carry the body’s “sewage” away from the tissues and neutralize it. It includes the spleen, tonsils, and thymus gland and plays an important role in boosting immunity, lessening pain and inflammation, and an overall sense of lightness and health.

A recent study found that 80 percent of women have sluggish lymphatic systems and that getting them flowing smoothly is the key to easy weight loss and improved feelings of well-being. Another study found that women with cellulite showed lymphatic system deficiencies. Here’s how you can get your lymph flowing smoothly:

1. Breathe deeply. The lymph system has 3 times more fluid than blood in the body, yet no heart-type organ to pump it. One of the main ways it moves is through breathing deeply. Breathe in that sweet smell of healing oxygen.

2. Get moving. Exercise also ensures the lymph system flows properly. The best kind is rebounding on a mini-trampoline, which can dramatically improve lymph flow, but stretching and aerobic exercise also works well.

3. Drink plenty of water. Without adequate water, lymph fluid cannot flow properly. To help ensure the water is readily absorbed by your cells, I frequently add some fresh lemon juice or Cellfood oxygen+nutrient drops to pure water.

4. Forget the soda, trash the color-laden sports-drink, and drop the sugary fruit “juices” that are more sugar than fruit. These sugar, color, and preservative-laden beverages add to the already overloaded work your lymph system must handle.

5. Eat more fruit on an empty stomach. The enzymes and acids in fruit are powerful lymph cleansers. Eat them on an empty stomach for best digestion and maximum lymph-cleansing benefits. Most fruits are digested within 30 minutes or so and are quick to start helping you feel better.

6. Eat plenty of green vegetables to get adequate chlorophyll to help purify your blood and lymph.

7. Eat raw, unsalted nuts and seeds to power up your lymph with adequate fatty acids. They include: walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, macadamias, Brazil nuts, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds.

8. Drink pure, unsweetened cranberry juice. Cranberries and cranberry juice emulsifies stubborn fat in the lymphatic system. Dilute it about 4:1 water to cranberry juice. Alternatively, if you prefer a sweeter juice, dilute one part cranberry juice with two parts unsweetened apple juice and two parts water.

9. Add a few lymph-boosting herbal teas to your day, such as astragalus, echinacea, goldenseal, pokeroot, or wild indigo root. Consult an herbalist or natural medicine specialist before combining two or more herbs or if you’re taking any medications or suffer from any serious health conditions. Avoid using herbs while pregnant or lactating and avoid long-term use of any herb without first consulting a qualified professional.

10. Dry skin brush before showering. Use a natural bristle brush. Brush your skin in circular motions upward from the feet to the torso and from the fingers to the chest. You want to work in the same direction as your lymph flows–toward the heart.

11. Alternate hot and cold showers for several minutes. The heat dilates the blood vessels and the cold causes them to contract. Avoid this type of therapy if you have a heart or blood pressure condition or if you are pregnant.

12. Get a gentle massage. Studies show that a gentle massage can push up to 78 percent of stagnant lymph back into circulation. Massage frees trapped toxins. You can also try a lymph drainage massage. It is a special form of massage that specifically targets lymph flow in the body. Whatever type of massage you choose, make sure it is gentle. Too much pressure may feel good on the muscles but it doesn’t have the same lymph stimulating effects.

Michelle Schoffro Cook, DNM, DAc, CNC is a best-selling and six-time book author and doctor of natural medicine, whose works include: The Life Force Diet, The Ultimate pH Solution, and The 4-Week Ultimate Body Detox Plan. Learn more at: www.TheLifeForceDiet.com.