Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

A New York Times article this week confirmed my worst fears – stress is sending Americans to candy stores in droves.¹

While at first glance this little headline, “When Economy Sours, Tootsie Rolls Soothe Souls” seems amusing, from my perspective it unwittingly brings up two important issues in healthcare today:

1. The simplistic assertion that to manage our weight, all we have to do is control calories in and calories out.

There are many factors that influence our ability to lose weight and keep it off, and this headline is an example of an important one – stress. Stress from economic crisis is doing what we see over and over again in patients at LMI — reducing serotonin and inducing carbohydrate cravings.

So what’s the harm in eating a little candy if you’re stressed? Nothing if you can stop at “a little,” but if you make that stop at the candy bowl too much of a habit, you can quickly undo weight loss and start to increase health risks.

Stress management is such an important factor for long term weight control, I have made it one of the key components of my approach to weight loss.

In a word, the answer to that question is yes. For example, as Jim’s article pointed out, foods which contain nutrients with methyl groups heavily influence your genetic expression and are known to reduce the risk of several cancers, including prostate, breast, and colon cancers.

If you were to ask most people,”What is the primary cause of skin cancer?” the answer would have something to do with the sun. That answer would be wrong. The sun is only a co-factor, and in most cases, it is only a minor co-factor.

You certainly would have had to look far and wide to find a “no-spin” reporting zone a couple of weeks ago when the New England Journal of Medicine¹ published a headline-grabbing study comparing weight loss on one of three diets: (1) Mediterranean, (2) Low-Carb, or (3) Low-Fat.

I doubt if many headline writers or reporters bothered to read the entire 13-page study — they were too busy writing dramatic headlines. But God is in the details, and in this case, the details were pretty important. So let’s take a look at this fairly important study and talk about what it actually showed (and, also important, what it didn’t show).

How many different diets have you tried? Did you buy cookbooks and try recipes, attempting to make major changes in the way you eat? Well, there are millions like you.

We’ve all heard that high cholesterol can kill us. Most physicians react by reaching for their prescription pads. Drugs to lower cholesterol, especially the statin drugs like Mevacor and Lipitor, are among the most commonly prescribed drugs on the market. Unfortunately, like all drugs, they come with side affects. We’d be much better off if [...]

Americans are experiencing a shocking epidemic of health problems from insulin resistance and the Metabolic Syndrome that it leads to. It’s even more shocking that many mainstream doctors are still recommending diets that are making these conditions even worse!
Here’s why. A number of studies over the last few years have shown that lower carb diets [...]

If you want to lose fat, eat more fat.

Sounds crazy, right?

Perhaps, but it’s true. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition recently showed that eating twice as much fat led to greater weight loss!

Many people see diet soda is an innocuous, harmless beverage that can’t possibly cause any harm to their waistline since it doesn’t have any calories. Think again.

Much like Pavlov’s dogs, we are trained to have a physiological response (hunger) to a neutral stimulus. We associate all sorts of things with food, from a holiday celebration to a fight with our spouse. Food nourishes us, but it also comforts us, soothes us and even medicates us when we’re feeling anxious, lonely or tired. No wonder it’s so easy to overeat!