I don’t know about you, but I have yet to see anything remotely resembling health care reform in any of the proposals coming out of congress these last few months. What I do see is a waste of resources and a continuation of the same old broken health care thinking that only leads to more disease, more illness, and more expense.

The crazy thing about all the hoopla surrounding the health care debate is that the way we approach health care has to change.

Really, it HAS to change. Either we change our health care system or we are going bankrupt.

The Need for Reform

The need to overhaul the health care system is greater than you might imagine. The reason for this is twofold: demographics and cost.

The Baby Boomers are just now approaching retirement age and will create a population shift that is truly unprecedented. To get an idea of just how unprecedented, take a look at the population 100 years ago. In the early 1900s, the number of people who were over 65 years old was only 3.1 million (or 4 percent of the population); today that number is 35 million (or 12 percent of the population). That number is expected to double by the year 2030 reaching 71 million (or 20 percent of the population).

The over-sixty-five population growth is not too much of a concern until you realize that most of these boomers need some form of health care. The older we get, the more the health care expenses we have.

Money and Health

We can pretend that the current legislation will fix the health care problems, but it won’t. What both sides of the debate fail to realize is that the health of the individual is intimately tied to the amount of money that needs to be spent on the individual.

For example, it costs about $50,000 dollars to care for a diabetic throughout their lifetime. While that doesn’t sound like too much, the United States spent an estimated 132 billion dollars in 2002 to pay for diabetic expenses.

And those are just the expenses associated with diabetes and not other chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer, or obesity. And it is the boomers, again, who are spending most of that money. A sixty-five-year-old with a serious chronic illness spends $1,000–$2,000 more per year on health care than a similar adult without the condition.

The total expenditures for health care in the United States for 2004 were 1.9 trillion dollars. While it is hard to grasp how large this number is, it equates to over $6,000 per person living in the United States. Currently, this spending on health care accounts for 16 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). By 2014, the total expenditures on health care are expected to hit 4 trillion dollars, meaning that one out of every five dollars in the United States will be spent on health care.

Think about that. One fifth of all expenditures will be health care related.

For comparison, Canada currently spends 9.6 percent of its GDP on health care, with the United Kingdom only spending 7.7 percent; our closest competitor is Switzerland, who spends around 11 percent.

Are we healthier for all these expenditures? While this is a hard thing to measure, a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared the health of Americans versus the British. While our per capita expenditures are more than twice ($5,274 per capita in the US vs. $2,164 in the United Kingdom) Americans are still not as healthy as their British counterparts.

The study compiled national survey data on health and lifestyles of people aged 40 to 70 and found that US citizens aged 55 to 64 were twice as likely to be diabetic, have high blood pressure, suffer from heart disease, and have nearly double the risk of cancer.

Americans, the study concluded, also have higher rates of heart attacks, stoke, and lung disease when compared to the British. Clearly, our health care dollars are not getting us what we want: better health.

Real Health Care Reform

If we are going to truly reform health care we are going to have to create a true health care system.

How do we do this?

What if we remember that health and money are intertwined and pay people to be healthy?

While this sounds a bit crazy, we do this kind of thing all the time. Taxes are the primary influencer of people. If we want more alternative energy, we offer tax incentives. If we want companies to hire more people, we offer tax incentives to companies.

Most of our health care dollars are going to diabetes, cancer, heart disease and complications from obesity. What is amazing about all of those conditions is that they are all mostly avoidable if we eat right and exercise.

So imagine a health care system where emergency health care is free and available to anyone. If you get in an accident or otherwise injure yourself, you are taken care of. But, if you have heart disease, diabetes, or some other chronic condition, you have to pay for that.

In this system, your insurance premiums are adjusted to how healthy you are. How do we determine your health? We do this by seeing how much you weigh as compared to your height; we measure your cholesterol, your blood pressure and your blood sugar. From these measurements, we determine your insurance premium; high cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure increase your premiums.

All of these parameters of health are measurable and modifiable through simple dietary changes. In addition, we give people the tools that they need to change those parameters and get healthier.

By motivating people through their pocketbook, we can radically change the way health care is provided and reduce expenses because people will be healthier.

Season of Sugar

It is that time of year again: The Season of Sugar.

As the weather turns colder, and the sun dips lower in the sky (except for you south of the equator), the days get darker, and we all get incredible sugar cravings. Our collective lust for sugar is only fueled by the multiple invitations to gather with friends and family and the tendency of office workers around the world to bring plates of tasty treats to share with everyone.

Too many holiday parties, too many advertisers highlighting tasty foods, too little time outside, too many temptations; it is no wonder we all wake these days feeling like we have a hangover and notice that our clothes don’t fit as well as they did the day before.

New Years

New Years is coming quicker than you might think and it is a good time to start thinking about New Year’s Resolution. The best resolution you can choose is a resolution of health and the best thing you can do for your health is to kick sugar and foods that act like sugar out of your life.

Why don’t you join us this January for 30 Sugar Free Days 2010 and give sugar the kick it deserves?

Sugar Harm

The question I always get is: Why kick sugar out of your diet?

The reason is actually pretty simple: Concentrated, pure, processed sugar is not a natural thing to put in your body. Our bodies are simply not meant to handle such a pure and addicting substance.

Take a look at what eating sugar does to you and your health:

• Sugar adds Weight: Added sugar means added weight. This happens because your body has to do something with the extra sugar that enters your blood stream. Maybe you know this, but your body is great at storing sugar as fat. This ability to store fat is unique to sugar and doesn’t happen with non-purified foods. Added weight means you are more likely to live a shorter life, get diabetes, heart disease, stroke and have certain cancers.
• Diabetes: Despite what most medical associations and your doctor might say, there is a connection between sugar and diabetes. Consistently high blood sugar develops into insulin insensitivity and eventually diabetes.
• Toxic: Sugar is toxic to blood vessels in a similar way that cigarette smoke is toxic to lungs. Sugar destroys blood vessels. The results of sugar damage are easy to see in diabetics (who have very high blood sugar) that have a much higher risk for heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, eye disease and other conditions.

Take the 30 Day Challenge

Kicking sugar means that you will not only lose weight (if you want to), but that you are taking the first big step toward living a longer and healthier life. When you kick sugar out of your life, you decrease the chance of getting diabetes, heart disease and even cancer.

Breaking the sugar habit is not easy; at every step you are going to run into your addiction. The effort to stop sugar, however, is well worth the results: you will live a longer, healthier life with sugar out of your diet.

Joining us for the 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge, 2010 is a great step towards your better health. The program is free and provides you with the support you need to succeed. So many weight loss programs are designed to help you shed pounds, but often do nothing to address your health.

Why not have both good health and weight loss? Join us for the adventure!

What to do if you can’t eat anything

There is a food trap that some people fall in to where the number of foods that they feel that they can eat slowly dwindles down to almost nothing.

I’m going to suggest to you that this problem doesn’t make you crazy, but it is largely your brain’s fault (or maybe it is better described as your genes fault).

This problem is probably best explained by the book Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Omnivores have a problem that no other type of eater has: deciding what to eat. A cow, for example, never wonders what it is going to put in its’ mouth, the grass it is walking on is always the answer. Likewise, you don’t see lions or sharks contemplating their dinner choices; if it is running or swimming away then it is on the menu.

We omnivores, though, have to test foods to see if they are okay for us. The key to understand why this might be a problem is to understand that omnivores attach how they feel after they eat something with whether the food is good for them or not. This is a handy tool to have: You eat some berries you think are okay to eat and later you get a stomach ache; next time you see that berry, you stay away from it.

The problem is that this omnivore-avoidance-system isn’t very accurate. Studies have shown that people are poor predictors of what might be good or bad for them. Part of the problem also lies in the complexity of the food we eat; many of the meals we eat are a mixture of many different foods. To add to the difficulty deciding what to eat is that we might be feeling bad for other reasons and just think it is the food we are eating.

So, when you are spiraling out of control and unable to find anything to eat, consider that many things you think are not good for you, may be okay.

What to do next?

Let’s say that you have thought about the above and tried to add in more foods, but still find that there are foods that you still cannot eat. Here is a plan for taking your diet to the next level.

• Testing: Many people want to turn to testing to find out what foods they are allergic to. My experience is that testing generally doesn’t help. Testing done on the skin is silly as the part of the immune system responsible for protecting the skin is different from the immune system in your gut. Blood testing gets you a bit closer, but will only show foods that you are allergic to and not those you have intolerances to (read the Food Allergy vs Food Intolerances part of the previous article). The best testing is removal and reintroducing of foods.
• Brain/Gut: Your brain is closely tied to your digestive system. Scientists are now calling this the Gut/Brain axis: as you think, so your gut feels. If you are stressed out or anxious, your gut will respond. Many people with digestive problems find that they go away when they are on vacation (and they usually eat worse than they normally do). Consider taking supplements for anxiety such as Kava Kava, GABA, theanine, or others.
• Digestive Enzymes: Some of your problems may be due to not having enough digestive enzymes. Get a very high quality digestive enzyme and see if that helps.
• Rebalance Bacteria: The bacteria in your gut may also be part of the problem. Try using a product called Zyflamend that is used for inflammation, but I have found works wonders on the gut. You can also go on an anti-yeast or anti-parasite program; make sure you take enough of the herbs for it to be successful. I recommend these products:
  • CandiGONE – Candida Cleansing Program by Renew Life
  • Paragone – Parasite Cleansing Program by Renew Life

Some combination of the above will work for you. It is a difficult path to return to normalish eating, but one well worth the journey.

People generally think that they need calcium in their diet (and they are right), but they also think that they need a lot of calcium and that milk is the only way to get enough.

There are many reasons why you might want to consider removing milk and milk products from your diet. Studies are starting to show just what kind of negative impact our love affair with the cow has on our health and even on our bones. When I suggest to people that they stop milk, I can almost guarantee that the next thing out of their mouths is, “yes, but where do I get my calcium?” There response speaks to the power, effectiveness, and tragedy (for our health) of advertising.

My answer to their question of where do you get enough calcium is to ask another question: “Where do cows, moose, and even elephants (who all have very strong bones) get their calcium if all they eat is grass?”

Foods high in calcium

While you might think that the only good source of calcium is milk, there are others. Yes, milk does contain calcium (1 cup has 296 mg of calcium), but milk is, by far, not the only good source of calcium. Take a look at these other foods:

• Sesame seeds (1 cup = 702 mg)
• Flax seeds (1 cup = 416 mg)
• Cabbage (1 cup = 380 mg)
• Collard greens (1 cup = 266 mg)
• Spinach (1 cup = 245 mg)
• Orange (1 cup = 104 mg)
• Kale (1 cup = 94 mg)
• Broccoli (1 cup = 62 mg)

What the Doctor Says

If you check with your medical doctor, they often give you the advice that people don’t get enough calcium. It is probably because of our doctor’s advice that calcium is the fourth most consumed supplement taken in the United States. Not only do calcium pills fly off the shelves, but you can also get calcium in your cereals, breads, soy drinks and even in your orange juice and chocolate bar.

But of all the nutritional guidelines a doctor might want to recommend, calcium makes the least sense.

How Much is too Much?

It is very common for doctors to suggest that you get 1200 mg of calcium every day, but where is the precedence for this? Where in our past history have humans consumed that much calcium? The answer is: nowhere. Imagine the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, or Native peoples around the world spending all their days gathering calcium in order that every person receives their 1200 mg a day. It just didn’t happen.

Where does this 1200 mg a day suggestion come from? It comes from research that shows that 1200 mg is the amount of supplemental calcium you need in order to increase the density of you bones.

And yes, it is true, if you supplement with that much calcium, you will increase your bone density. But here is the real question: does it really make any difference to your health to supplement with that much calcium?

Bone Research

A funny thing happened in the bone research lab.

Scientists wanted to find a way to reduce bone fractures, so they started to look for ways to make bones stronger, but the only way they could measure osteoporosis is through a bone density test. What they found out what was that supplementing with calcium did indeed make bones denser, but no one (until recently) questioned whether supplementing with that much calcium made any difference to bone fractures.

Here are the results of a study done in 1986¹

Yes, supplementing with calcium did increase bone density, but it does not reduce bone fractures. As you can see from the chart above, the countries with the most calcium consumption have the largest chance of hip fractures. Why is this?

Too much calcium in the bones actually makes bones more brittle. So you get denser bones when you supplement with calcium, but you are just as likely to break those bones as you were before you 30-year, 1200mg-a-day, odyssey.

More Studies on Milk

But it doesn’t stop there; more studies show that milk and calcium have an effect on fractures (but the opposite of what our milk education said it would).

For example, a 12 year study in 1997 that followed 77,000 women showed that women who drink 2 or more glasses of milk are actually almost 50 percent higher risk of fracture than those who don’t drink milk.².

How to Get Enough Calcium

Stop focusing on calcium as your source for good and healthy bones. The health of your bones has more to do with other factors than it does with how much calcium you can shove into your mouth.

Here is how to optimize your bone health:

• Calcium: Get your calcium from foods. This means that you eat more green leafy vegetables.
• Vitamin D: Make sure you get enough vitamin D. This will be the subject of a future post, but for now, get outside as often as possible and you might have to think about supplementing.
• Exercise: Yes, you have to get out and move your buns around.
• Foods: Both high salt and high protein will reduce the amount of bone you have. Consider a vegetarian or mostly-vegetarian diet.

1. Hegsted DM. Calcium and osteoporosis. J Nutr. 1986 Nov;116(11):2316-9.
2. Feskanich D. et al. Milk, dietary calcium, and bone fractures in women: a 12-year prospective study. Am J Public Health 1997;87(6);992-7.

• What food is high in calcium?
• What food is high in vitamin C?
• What food is high in potassium?
• What food should you eat to make sure you have strong bones?
• What nutrient should you eat to make strong muscles?
• What food is good for women going through menopause? Hint: it is also good for breast cancer.

Here are the answers:

• The food high in calcium: Dairy foods (milk, cheese, yogurt)
• The food high in vitamin C: Orange Juice
• The food high in potassium: Bananas
• To make strong bones: Dairy foods
• To make strong muscles: Meat (beef, chicken, fish)
• The food good for menopause: Soy

How Did You Do on the Quiz?

How did you do on our little nutritional quiz? You probably got the right answers, but are those answers the correct answers?

While most people, when asked, have a hard time answering common knowledge questions (like who the vice president is, or pointing out Iraq on a world map) they surprisingly get most of the answers to this nutritional quiz right. The question you should now ask yourself is: how is it most people know the answers to these questions and not others? You might reply that you learned a lot of your nutritional knowledge in school, and that is true. What you might not realize is that even though you might very well have learned the answers to these questions in school, the reason why you learned these nutritional tidbits is because of a concerted effort of the marketing arm of certain special interest groups.

Let’s quickly look at vitamin C and potassium.

Vitamin C

While orange juice certainly contains vitamin C, here are some other foods that have even more vitamin C per weight than oranges:

• Papaya, guava, red bell pepper, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, kiwi, parsley

These foods have about the same amount as oranges:

• Green bell pepper, strawberries, elderberry, lemons, cauliflower

Potassium

Yes, bananas do contain potassium, but here are foods that contain more per weight:

• Cantaloupe, prune juice, papaya, beans (pinto, lima…), lentils, potatoes, prunes, spinach, winter squash, tomato sauce

These foods have about the same amount of potassium as bananas:

• Raisons, mango, orange, melons, peanuts

Why?

The reason why you associate different foods with different nutrients is that these foods have been branded in your mind by advertising. Some of this branding is relatively harmless, such as vitamin C and potassium. The associations you have in your mind about calcium, muscle mass, bones and soy, however are a different story. In the following posts, we will investigate the myths that surround calcium, dairy foods, meat, and soy and see how following the so-called common food knowledge will only get you into trouble.

Read More

• Calcium Myths

The Real Deal

In case you haven’t seen this, this is that ad from the High Fructose Corn Syrup lobbying group:

Even Funnier

While you might have found that video funny, here are some even more funny.

This first one is by the guys who did King Corn and they probably could have done it as a advertisement for my book, Sugarettes. If you haven’t checked out their documentary, do! It is great!

The next three are great as well. Some of them need some help with editing/production, but the point is well taken.

You know that sugar is bad for you and your kids, so you take another look at the label. But even that is a nightmare: You know that glucose is a sugar but what about maltodextrin, or dextrose?

All this is enough to make you go crazy! Even if you are successful at steaming the tide of sugar into your house, your kids are often out of your sight and exposed to sugar in their daycare, their schools, or, if they are older… everywhere they can travel.

Sugar Consumption Junction

We consume a lot of sugar. Most adults and children are eating 1/4 to 1/2 of a pound of sugar every day.

Kids are no better:

A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics, found that

• 10 to 15 percent of our children’s total calories are coming from fruit juice or soda (and juice, from a sugar point of view, is no better than soda).
• Children and teens aged six to eighteen, averaged 30 ounces of juice or soda every day (or 20 teaspoons of sugar).
• Younger children were drinking an average of 15.5 ounces of sugary drinks (or 10 teaspoons of sugar a day).

What is amazing about this study is that it only focused on sugars in drinks and not the cereal, cookies, jam, candies, crackers, ice cream and other foods our children are eating. Clearly, our children are eating a lot of sugar.

The Problem with Sugar

If you have ever wondered if sugar is harmful or not, let me put your mind at unrest: sugar is harmful. While there is not a single established medical association that has yet to speak up, there is mounting evidence that sugar is harming our health and the health of our children.

Sugar has two distinct characteristics that make it harmful.

First, sugar is addictive. Scientists have discovered is that sugar is every bit as addictive as cigarettes, alcohol, and even hard drugs. Rats that have become addicted to sugar act the same and have the same brain chemistry as rats addicted to those other “hard” drugs. So when you try to take sugar away from your children and they go crazy you know that you are experiencing addictive behavior. This is why we as adults also have a hard time staying away from the white stuff. Sugar has a powerful grip on us and seeing sugar as addiction explains a lot of the behavior we see around sugar, including binging, cravings and even yo-yo dieting. If you feel constantly pulled by sugar’s sweet song, you are not alone.

Second, sugar damages the body and it does so through three mechanisms.

• Weight: The standard medical opinion of sugar is that it contains calories, so it may add to our growing obesity epidemic, but only because of the calories it contains. This is true, but sugar does so much more to add to our weight. When our blood sugar is raised to the high levels that occur when we eat sugar (and especially when we drink sugar), our bodies store that extra sugar-energy as fat. This is a unique aspect of sugar that doesn’t occur, say, when you eat a steak.
• Insulin Insensitivity: Consistently high blood sugar leads to insulin insensitivity. When the cells of our body become insensitive to insulin it creates a downward spiral to poor sugar control, including metabolic syndrome and eventually diabetes.
• Toxic: Sugar is toxic in much the same way that cigarette smoke is toxic to the lungs of a smoker; only sugar harms our blood vessels. As sugar enters our blood stream, it damages the very blood vessels that carry sugar throughout the body. We see this damage dramatically in people with very high blood sugar (diabetes) whose eyes, kidneys, hearts, and nerves are all damaged by sugar. The same sugar damage occurs in people who are not diabetic, only at a slower rate.

Sugar is at least partly responsible for the ever growing epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and even heart disease and it even affects the brains and moods of our children.

How to Survive Sugar Land

For most of us, completely eliminating sugar from our children’s diet is an impossible task. Not only do we have to face our children’s and our own addiction, but our children are out of our sight for much of the day – especially as they grow older.

In the study mentioned above in the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that most of the sugar consumption (55-70 percent) occurred in the home, so parents do have a lot of control. Here are some ideas to help you control the amount of sugar your children are consuming:

• Get rid of soda: Removing all soda from the house can dramatically cut down on the amount of sugar that children are eating. Fruit juice should also go, but many parents feel they need some sweet drink in the house and while fruit juice still alters blood sugar, it does contain some nutrients – use with moderation.
• Look for hidden sugars: While you won’t know if everything on a label is sugar, look for the OSE at the end of the ingredient. Examples of sugars include glucose, maltose, fructose, dextrose; this won’t help you find all the sugars, but it will take care of most of them.
• Eat crunchy: Encourage your children to eat something fresh and crunchy with every meal. When we try this in our home, our kids always say potato chips are crunchy and we have to say, no: fresh and crunchy. Good crunchy foods are carrots, celery, apples, pears, peaches… and really most fruit.
• Eat Fruit: For the most part, fruits, eaten in whole-form, are much better and don’t cause a rise in blood sugar the way that juices made from the same fruits do. Try mixed berries with a little whipped cream as an afternoon snack (whipped cream makes anything fun).
• Stay away from artificial sugars: While the subject of artificial sweeteners is an article (or a book) in itself, let me say that these chemical sweeteners are harmful enough to recommend eating sugar over them. Artificial sweeteners are chemicals that shouldn’t be in our bodies and we are just beginning to see the damage that they cause.
• Sugar substitutes: The best natural sugars are Stevia and xylitol. Stevia is an herb that is super-sweet but has no calories, and it actually helps with blood sugar control. It takes some effort to learn how to cook with it, but it usually satisfies that sweet tooth. Xylitol is a sugar that has some benefits including not increasing blood sugar dramatically and it has also been shown to be an anti-cavity sugar.

What to do if you can’t stay away from sugars:

• Know what keeps blood sugar low: If you cannot get sugar out of your life, you need to understand how to keep you and your children’s blood sugar low. The nutrients that keep blood sugar low are: protein, fats and fiber. So the best way to eat a sugar is to eat it in a meal where protein, fats and fiber are present. This means giving children their desert right after dinner, or having them include other foods (that contain a protein, fat or fiber) with their snack. So don’t pass out the cookies without, say, a hot dog. Don’t give a juice box without, say, peanut butter. Peanut butter (especially the non-added sugar kind) makes everything taste good: put it on apples, carrots, celery… whatever they will eat.

Sugar Challenge

You are in for a challenge when you try to keep sugar away from kids; doing the right thing is hard. Every step you make to remove sugar is a step in the right direction. Sugar is a powerful foe, but you can lessen the damage with a few simple changes in what you are offering your children. If you are really brave, you can check out the 30 30 Sugar Free Days Challenge.

Good luck and good eating!

While medical doctors scoff at the idea that Candida can cause illness, many people swear by anti-Candida diets and claim that they feel much better when they eliminate sugar and other foods that might contribute to the growing of these yeasts.

There is a big gulf between what most natural medicine practitioners and medical doctors think about Candida. To confuse you even further, I’m going to suggest to you a completely different way of looking at Candida that dispels some of the myths around this one-celled creature, but also helps you to understand why the anti-Candida diets do work and how important that might be to your health.

Not Just Candida

The problem with Candida is that it doesn’t travel alone To understand this, you have to understand a concept called dysbiosis.

Perhaps it is just human nature to simplify things, but the story of Candida is much more complex than one simple yeast causing your pain and discomfort. Dysbiosis is described as an imbalance of the bacterial ecosystem in your gut. The ecosystem in your gut  (also called gut flora) is a big deal and when you are eating sugar and foods that act like sugar, you are changing the ecosystem in your gut (and not in a good way).

There are both good and bad bacteria throughout your digestive system. The health of your digestive system relies heavily on having a balance between the good and bad bacteria that inhabit your gut. Unfortunately, many of the things we do every day destroy that balance: Poor food choices, stress, and exposure to chemicals in our environment, all tilt the balance in the favor of bad bacteria. When bad bacteria thrive, we don’t.

Bad bacteria are bad because when they grow, they produce all sorts of toxins that are harmful to our bodies. Candida itself produces toxins that some people seem to be extremely sensitive to. Imbalances in our digestive flora are tied to all sorts of diseases, from heart disease, arthritis, autoimmune diseases and more.

The first thing to remember is this: Candida is not alone, there are other critters such as bacteria that can harm you just as much as Candida does. It is not just Candida, but a general shift from health gut bugs to unhealthy gut bugs.

Can Candida Make me Crave Sugar?

This is a bit tougher to answer than you might think: The answer to this question is yes and no.

Most people think that Candida causes them to crave sugar as if the small one-celled organism can collectively take over your mind and cause you to crave more sugar. As far as we know, Candida doesn’t have that kind of mind control powers.

But what does happen when you eat a large amount of sugar and foods that act like sugar is that you grow gut flora that also like sugar.

Here is what happens: Imagine you have a garden full of food that rabbits love. When you have a garden like that, you are more likely to have rabbits eating the food in your garden, the same is true of your gut: If you are constantly eating foods high in sugar, then you grow a bacterial colonies that also thrive on sugar.

Now, if you have a gut full of sugar-loving organisms, what happens when you stop eating so much sugar? The bacteria, yeast, and other critters in your gut munch most of the sugars that you are eating (even if you are eating very few). The end result? You (your body) is not getting many of these sugars (because the bugs get to them first). This is one of the reasons why you crave sugars so much when you go on a low-sugar diet: the bugs are eating any sugars that pass their way (after all, they are hungry too).

Stopping Sugar

An anti-Candida diet helps you to feel better because it restores the balance of good bacteria and bad bacteria in your gut. It also is another good reason to kick sugar.

Understanding dysbiosis also helps you to understand why your cravings for sugar to increase when you kick sugar foods: There are so many bacteria and other critters clambering for food that you don’t get as much.

The best way to deal with dysbiosis is to take herbs that make it hard for them to thrive. My favorites are the berberine-containing herbs (such as Oregon Grape, Barberry and Goldenseal). Look for supplements that contain these when you are looking for an anti-Candida diet.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you understand what is really going on when you go on an anti-Candida diet, the results are the same: You feel better. More importantly, you are increasing your health.

All this is good advice, but there is really only one thing you have to do to improve the chances that you will live longer: Look further down the road.

Looking Further

You spend your days making decisions. You decide to get out of bed, what to eat for breakfast, what clothes you are gong to wear during the day… Many of these decisions are automatic such as brushing your teeth, wearing a seatbelt, scratching your head. And each of those decisions , no matter how minor,  has an impact on your life. Some have a small impact on your life. Other decisions have more impact such as: should you move? should you marry? should you take that job?

The most important decisions you make, though, are the ones that appear to have little impact on your life when taken as a one-time event, but when repeated over a whole lifetime, have a huge impact.

Take a look:

• One cigarette means nothing to your health, but a pack of cigarettes a day for years equal cancer.
• One soda is a tasty treat, three sodas a day means a bigger chance for being overweight and having diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease…
• Driving in a car is the easy way to get to the store, walking instead of driving every day means you live longer.
• You may be too busy to call a friend back, but having good friends means you are more likely to live a longer and fuller life.
• You can’t find the time to exercise today, but exercises over a lifetime gives you energy, better sleep and can forestall diseases such as dementia, heart disease, diabetes and more.

There are more of these you can probably think of, consider adding yours to the comment section below!

Our Brains

Here is the problem: our brains are not set up to look further down the road. Are brains are set up to notice sudden and dramatic threats and adjust to them. If people took a puff from a cigarette and fell down dead, then we would avoid them. But since they kill us slowly, we seem to hardly notice the destruction because it is so slow. The same is true of sugar and other poor foods that we eat. The same is true about deciding to exercise, or take time with friends or the hundred of other healthy things we could be doing.

Humans are unique, though, in the fact that they can see further down the road, they can look at their futures.

Here is what you should commit to in order to increase your odds of staying on the earth longer:

• Eat better: I suggest Eating Below the Glycemic Index you can also try my 30 Sugar Free Days as a way to kick start a healthy eating plan.
• Exercise: Move your body around every day, sweat a little.
• Make Connections: Connect to friends, family and other social groups.
• Laugh: If you are not enjoying life, what is the point?

Take the time to develop habits that empower you and lean you towards better health, the payback is well worth the effort.

FDA approves Stevia

You have probably heard that Stevia has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and were wondering if it was safe.

Let me clear up the first part: the FDA approved extracts of Stevia and not Stevia itself:

The FDA approved:

Cargill Inc’s: Truvia zero-calories sweetener

Whole Earth Sweetener Co: PrueVia

Truvia contains:

• Erythritol: is a very low calorie natural sweetener (similar to xylitol)
• Rebiana: is a trade name for rebaudioside A (Reb-A) a steviol glycoside that is thought to be responsible for the sweet taste of Stevia

PrueVia contains:

• Stevia extract (97% Pure Reb A)

How Safe is it?

While there were a few studies that showed that rebaudioside and other glycosides in Stevia had the potential to cause cancers, these studies have mostly be debunked. Most toxicology tests show that it causes no harm in laboratory testing.

Stevia itself has been shown to actually help improve insulin sensitivity, thereby having the potential to prevent conditions such as diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that an extract of an herb is not the herb itself. While it might be safe to take an herb, it may not be safe to take a concentrated form of only one part of the herb (such as using rebaudioside A). The truth is that we won’t know until a lot of people start taking it, and thanks to Coke and Pepsi who will be putting Truvia and PrueVia into products soon, we will get a chance to see just how safe taking large amounts of these extracts is.

My thought is that since these sweeteners are naturally based and Stevia has been used for hundreds of years, it is probably safe to use these new sweeteners as long as you are not overdoing it.