Speaking of health, naturally
with Kathleen Barnes
Thanks for the enthusiastic response I’ve received for the first issue
of Living, Naturally. There will be lots more!
Two pieces of news I’d like to share with you:
1. My new book is out! The Secret of Health: Breast Wisdom, the book I wrote with Dr. Ben Johnson of The Secret is now available through my website and through all the online booksellers. You can also order it at any bookstore.
This is a unique approach to breast health based on some unusual ideas about bras, mammograms, diet, supplements and cancer prevention and treatment all with strong links to the Law of Attraction that is discussed in depth in The Secret. I’m sure you and all the women you love will enjoy it.
2. My old book is back out again!
Trial by Fire: A Woman Correspondent’s Journey to the Front Line (originally published in 1990) is back in print thanks to my colleagues at the American Society of Journalists and Authors and iUniverse. It’s a very personal rite of passage-journalist’s adventure tale-women’s empowerment story mostly set in the tumultuous time in the Philippines that surround the ouster Ferdinand Marcos. It’s been a called a “good read.” It would make a good holiday gift for your wish list or for someone on your gift list. Trial by Fire is available at all the online booksellers or by order from book
stores.
If you like this newsletter, please feel free to forward the address of this page to your friends and encourage them to subscribe.
Happy holidays and be well,
Kathleen
The holidays are with us . . .
I know, we’ve just passed Thanksgiving and if you’re like many of us, the holiday was focused around food and family. I hope it was also about gratitude for your many blessings.
As you’re planning your meals for the coming holidays, please give some thought to the turkey or whatever meat you choose to serve—and what it may contain.
The livestock industry uses the vast majority of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. each year, not to treat illness in animals, but to make them grow larger and faster. Of course, those antibiotics remain in the flesh we’re eating, contributing to a variety of health problems, including antibiotic
resistant bacterial infections and, for those who are susceptible, yeast overgrowth.
Most turkeys and commercially produced meats are also treated with growth hormones that get into our bodies the same way and wreak all sorts of havoc to our hormonal systems including causing precocious puberty in little girls (see Issue No. 1) and feminization in young boys.
These growth hormones are probably linked to rising rates of hormonally-related cancers: breast, uterine, cervical and prostate.
Look for an organic turkey or a turkey raised without antibiotics or growth hormones. If you prefer a roast beef or leg of lamb, apply the same criteria.
Your taste buds—and your body—will thank you!
The Eat Well Guide will help connect you with producers, stores and restaurants in your area that sell antibiotic- and hormone-free meats.
Not only will you be eating healthier holiday meals, you’ll be supporting local farmers and businesses. Best of all, you’ll be buying locally produced foods that are fresher, more nutritious and gentler on the environment because of their organic or nearly organic origins and the short distance they travel to market.
So is cold and flu season . . .
Colds and flu abound this time of year, but you don’t have to be a victim.
Here are a few guidelines to keep you healthy and to reduce the misery if you do catch a bug:
1. Wash your hands often. The majority of flu is transmitted hand-to-hand or skin-to-skin. So, during the flu season, avoid rubbing your eyes or nose, and encourage your kids to children keep their hands out of their mouths, especially if they are in day are or in school.
Most importantly, you and your kids should wash your hands thoroughly several times a day with hot water and soap, especially before meals. Those antibacterial wipes at the supermarket entrance, used to wipe the handles of your cart are a strong preventive measure.
It’s also a good practice to wash your hands with hot soapy water every time you use the bathroom, but most importantly in public restrooms.
A word of caution: Once you finish washing your hands in a public restroom, use a paper towel to turn off the faucet and use the towel to open the door handle. This will cut back on a huge amount of your exposure to cold and flu germs.
2. Eat a healthy diet rich in vitamins C and E. Foods containing these vitamins are a major way of supporting your immune system.
Get your daily vitamin C from foods like these: all citrus fruits, strawberries, broccoli, green and red peppers, currants, Brussels sprouts, parsley and potatoes.
Foods rich in vitamin E include all nuts and seeds, wheat germ oil, whole grains, egg yolks, and leafy green vegetables. Certain vegetable oils should contain significant amounts of vitamin E, but many of the vegetable oils sold in supermarkets have had the vitamin E removed in processing.
The high amounts found in supplements, often 100 to 800 IU per day, are concentrated,
so they are not obtainable from food.
Sugar is harmful in so many ways that it’s worth an entire article on its own. Let it suffice for now to say that among its many evils, table sugar and all products containing any types of processed sugar impair your body’s immune response. Avoid it now and all the time.
3. Get a good night’s sleep. Lack of sleep can profoundly inhibit your immune system. Get a full night’s sleep to keep your body’s natural defenses at optimum efficiency. This is especially important for teenagers who tend to have poor sleep habits. While sleep requirements are individual, most of us need seven to eight hours of sleep each night to obtain and maintain our health. Most of us don’t get anywhere near that much.
Work on good sleep habits. Go to back about the same time every night and get up about the same time every morning. Sleep in a dark, quiet room. No television in the bedroom! I repeat: No television in the bedroom! Good sleep habits also include a slow wind-down that starts an hour or so before bed. That means no stimulating television shows, no eating, no caffeinated
beverages and no exercise (except sex, of course!).
Prepare for bed with a cordial conversation with your partner, take a warm shower and perhaps drink a cup of soothing sleepy time tea. This will help change poor sleep habits and deliver long term good health.
4. Manage your stress. There’s no doubt about it: Stress compromises your immune system. Modern life makes stress management difficult, and hubbub of the holidays probably won’t help, even if the hurry-up go-go is happy stress.
Take some time for yourself every day. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, love yourself enough to take a break, a bath, even a few minutes to listen to some favorite music or to a brief meditation. All of these have dramatic effects on your body’s production of cortisol, the stress hormone.
5. Drink lots of water. We all need lots of water. Experts say that almost everyone needs at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. Yes, you do get some water content from fruits, soups and juices, but you can’t count coffee, soft drinks or alcoholic beverages, all of which tend to be dehydrating.
Increasing your water intake will help flush toxins form your system. If you are feeling under the weather, extra fluids prevent the dehydration caused by fever, loosens mucus, keeps your throat moist and lessens the chance of you’ll come down with a cold or flu.
If a virus has grabbed you, drink warm liquids. They are comforting, maybe because they just feel good with a raw throat or stuffy head. I love tea with lemon and honey, all three proven immune system boosters.
There is some evidence that inhaling steam early in the course of a cold or flu may reduce the spread of viruses in your upper respiratory tract.
Adding a drop or two of eucalyptus oil to the steam really helps open things up. For the same reason, a hot bath with essential oils will help with the symptoms.
There’s also a lot to be said for chicken soup, good ol’ fashioned Jewish penicillin. It doesn’t actually help reduce inflammation in the respiratory tract, but the heat makes you fee better, even if it’s only temporary. Your mother and grandmother couldn’t be wrong!
6. Exercise regularly. Not only can regular exercise lower stress, but research indicates that exercise can stimulate the immune system and promotes healthy sleep.
A recent study reported in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, scientists found that modest exercise may prevent the elderly from getting colds and the flu.
A word of caution based on bitter experience from my foolish youth: I was a runner and I made the happy discovery that a stuffy head would clear right up as long as I continued exercising. As soon as I’d stop, I’d get stuffy again, so I was like a hamster on a wheel, running incessantly until I finally dropped from exhaustion. Of course, then I was really, really sick for three or four weeks. I’m a lot older and hopefully a tiny bit wiser now, so I don’t exercise when I’m sick.
7. Listen to your body. This goes hand-in-hand with the above point: If you do come down with a cold or the flu, take it easy. Spending excessive amounts of energy will steal valuable resources from your immune system. Even attempting to perform normal activities at work or school may be too much.
Here’s a good place to add another piece of advice: Thanks for not sharing.
If you believe you’re coming down with a cold or the flu, you probably are. Stay home. The greatest kindness to your friends and family is keep your germs to yourself.
8. Be careful with medicines. Don’t give children cold and flu medicine. Most of these have recently been removed from the market, but if you have any still hanging around the house, throw them away. They don’t work and they can cause serious harm, even death.
For adults, taking over-the-counter cold or flu preparations may address the symptoms, but nothing will cure the cold. Make sure you’re not overdosing, especially if you take some sort of “all in one” remedy and then you add in cough medicine or ibuprofen for the aches and pains.
Antibiotics will not help. I repeat that: Antibiotics will not help. Antibiotics are effective against bacterial infections. They do nothing when you have a virus. Demanding antibiotics from your doctor may get you a prescription, but it won’t cure your cold or reduce its duration. What antibiotics might do is make you resistant when you really need them.
9. Know what’s ailing you. A cold is a cold. It is caused by a virus. It takes about two weeks to fully recover from a cold. The flu is a lot different from the common cold.
It’s important to know the difference:
With a cold, you generally have a stuffy nose, scratchy throat, cough and occasionally a low grade fever, headache and body aches. Nasal secretions with colds are generally thick and green or yellow. Yucky, but not life threatening.
The flu generally starts with a sudden and high fever (102 to 106 degrees F for an adult) accompanied by a distinct lack of energy. After two or three days, the fever usually subsides and is replaced by respiratory symptoms that can include a dry hacking cough, croup, sore throat and bronchitis.
This can sometimes lead to other infections, including pneumonia. That’s when it can get dangerous and a doctor is needed.
If your symptoms become significantly worse after the first three days of illness, especially if your fever subsides and then returns, be sure to seek medical attention right away. The reason that the flu is considered a potentially dangerous infection is that leaves the body vulnerable to
other infections, like pneumonia.
10. Take supplements for prevention and treatment. These supplements are scientifically validated. They should keep your immune system strong and prevent colds and flu.
Vitamin A, C and E: These antioxidants will help keep your immune system strong. That’s nine-tenths of the battle during cold and flu season. Did you ever wonder why you might get a cold and your spouse doesn’t despite your incessant coughing in his face? His immune system is probably stronger than your right now. You’ll need an ongoing supplement program that gives you at least 7,500 mg or Vitamin A, 500 mg of Vitamin C and 100 IU of vitamin E. Some experts advise an upper limit on these supplements of 25,000 IU of vitamin A, 2,000 mg of vitamin C and 2,000 IU of vitamin E.
Other effective immune system enhancers include astragalus, various mushroom extracts and garlic.
Echinacea: This wonder herb is much misused because people think they should take it all the time. Echinacea gives a big boost to the immune system, but it will put your immune system into overdrive and wear it out if you take Echinacea all the time. In winter, it’s a good idea to take it for two weeks, stop for a week and start again. If you get a cold or flu, take larger amounts of echinacea for two weeks, then stop entirely and allow your revved up immune system to protect you. While some studies show that echinacea is not effective, recent Australian research suggests that most people in those studies were taking dosages too low to be effective.
The latest recommendations are to take 1,000 mg of echinacea three times a day for a limited time period.
Homeopathics: I have personally found homeopathics like Zicam™ and Oscillococcinum™ can be very effective if I take them the moment I begin to notice symptoms, but they don’t seem to work as well for everyone or for every virus or if the virus has really got a hold on you.
Finally, if you’ve got a cold or the flu, the best medicines are patience and rest. Get down on the couch with a warm blanket and a good novel and read a little and doze a little for a few days.
This, too, shall pass.
Re-think your bra
An excerpt from The Secret of Health: Breast Wisdom”
by Ben Johnson, M.D., D.O., N.M.D and Kathleen Barnes (Morgan James 2008):
Free movement
We’re not throwbacks to the 60s, and we don’t recommend bra burning, because bras can be valuable pieces of apparel at least for social and athletic purposes. However, we ask you to consider keeping your bra for public consumption and going braless in the comfort of your own home.
There are three major reasons why bras can be contrary to breast health:
- They raise the temperature of the breasts.
- They restrict oxygen and nutrient flow to the tissues.
- They restrict the flow of toxin-removing lymphatic fluids.
While the medical community has not yet made a definite pronouncement, Dr. Ben is convinced that there is sufficient research to prove there is a connection between wearing a bra and a woman’s risk of breast cancer.
Let’s start with a few sobering numbers.
Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer, husband and wife authors of Dressed to Kill (Avery Press, 1995), interviewed 4,730 women in five major US cities between 1991 and 1993. Their findings were very impressive:
- Women who wore their bras for 24 hours per day had a 3 out of 4 chance of developing breast cancer in their lifetimes. (The study included 2056 subjects for the cancer group and 2674 for the standard group).
- Women who wore bras more than 12 hours per day, but not to bed, had a 1 in 7 risk of developing breast cancer.
- Women who wore their bras less than 12 hours per day had a 1 out of 152 risk.
- Women who wore bras rarely or never, had a 1 in 168 chance of getting breast cancer.
While there has been little follow-up research, we are confident that someday we’ll know why this study showed a 125-fold difference in cancer rates between bra-free breasts and those constricted and heated by 24-hour-per-day bra-wearing.
There are lots of puzzle pieces to put in place here and we’re aware that there may be some leaps of logic. Direct clinical research simply does not exist and probably never will exist. That’s because drug companies fund research on new drugs that can make them money and they cannot make money on lifestyle changes that may prevent cancer.
There are many causes of breast cancer, but since we believe wearing a bra is one of them, it’s one risk that can very easily be addressed.
Contents of this page are copyrighted, and may be used freely, if unedited and with attribution as follows:
Source: Kathleen Barnes, www.kathleenbarnes.com
The content provided by this site is for informational purposes only and has not been approved by the U.S. FDA. This site is not intended to provide personal medical advice, which should be obtained from a medical professional.
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