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

If you want to look and feel young, it is essential to have an anti-aging strategy. I’m not talking about harsh facelifts or exotic drug cocktails. Exciting research has revealed natural and effective ways to stay physically active, mentally sharp and younger looking well into your golden years. Here, I will review my top strategies to fight aging in every aspect of your life, from the food you eat to the ingredients that may help keep you young.¹

The next time you hear some nay-saying doctor claiming that there is no evidence that vitamins actually do anything, show him this:

A new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that multivitamins can keep you younger, longer. It shows that people who take a daily multivitamin had younger DNA.

The study found that those who took a multivitamin daily had 5.1% longer telomeres than non-users.¹

Telomeres are the key to aging. And it’s not just your life span that’s affected… Short telomeres dramatically boost your risk of serious diseases. One study of 60- to 75-year-olds showed those with short telomeres had a 300% higher death rate from heart disease and an 800% higher death rate from infectious diseases.²

In case you haven’t been following our story on the amazing advances in telomere biology, telomeres are part of your DNA. They can be found in every cell in your body, and are critical to youthful cell function. But as your cells divide, your telomeres get shorter… and the shorter your telomeres, the older your cells behave. (See my article in the October 14 issue of THB.)

If you are over the age of 50, you may have seriously clogged arteries as a result of poor diet, genetics or a lack of adequate vitamin and mineral supplementation. That means all 75,000 miles of your arteries, veins and capillaries may be full of plaque that can cause a blockage.

But new research indicates that two key nutrients can help you combat the causes of heart problems, toxic build-up and decreasing energy levels.

As a medical professional, I agree with modern science that consuming a high-fat diet can lead to heart disease, but new evidence has surfaced to explain the process.

Research from the University of Cincinnati¹ examined high-fat diets and the effect they can have on the adipose — or fatty — tissue surrounding the coronary arteries. Neil Weintraub, M.D. and colleagues found that the fat cells were highly inflamed, which suggests that the blood vessels could become inflamed. This is one of the first indicators of clogged arteries, or atherosclerosis.

Another startling discovery showed that rats on a high-fat diet for only two weeks already showed the effects of inflammation in the tissue around the arteries! “These new findings suggest a direct link between poor dietary habits and inflammation of blood vessels, mediated by the fat cells surrounding the blood vessel wall,” said lead author Weintraub.

Have pig farmers done for sufferers of bipolar disorder what the most brilliant medical minds have thus far failed to accomplish? If you ask 36-year-old Autumn Stringham from Alberta, Canada, you’ll probably get a resounding yes. Mental illness runs in Autumn’s family. Her mother had bipolar disorder for years and committed suicide at age 40. Her grandfather took his life years earlier with the same illness.

Married at 18, Autumn was soon pregnant with her first child and in a deep depression. She emerged, only to turn manic, paranoid, and obsessed with the urge to stab herself in the belly. She gave birth to a healthy son, but by age 20, she too was hospitalized with bipolar disorder and began taking a five-drug cocktail of anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and anti-anxiety medications. Still, she was barely functioning and taking care of her child.

As Autumn continued her struggle with bipolar disorder, her 15-year-old brother Joseph began spiraling out of control with bipolar-related episodes of violence, anger, and aggression. Autumn’s father, Anthony Stephan, terrified he’d lose two of his children the same way he lost his wife, began to look for help outside of traditional medications. That’s when he met David Hardy, a former biology teacher and livestock feed salesman.

When Stephan described the family’s history of mental illness and his son’s violent tendencies, Hardy made a connection. It sounded a lot like a condition seen in pigs that become hyper-irritable, hyper-active and aggressive to the point of killing each another. The farmers “cure” the disorder known as ear-and-tail-biting-syndrome by adding a vitamin and mineral formula to the animals’ feed.¹

Could the same thing possibly help his children?

Fatigue is one of the biggest problems of modern life, but we’re trying to fix that problem in all the wrong ways.

Trying to “get” or “find” energy is like trying to grab a fistful of water. If you want water (energy) to sit in your hand, you have to first create the conditions under which it’s possible — in the case of water, keeping your fingers tightly together and your hand cupped while open will do the trick — but trying to grab the water will not. It’s the same thing with energy.

Energy isn’t something you get or grab, but rather the by-product of certain conditions that allow it to show up in your life. If your health and attitude and body and mind are all aligned in the right way, there’s nothing else for you to do but to feel energized. It’s the natural “side-effect” of a healthy life — it just comes with the territory.

Let’s say you were a swimmer wearing a weight belt and you wanted to increase your time in the 50-yard freestyle. You could spend a lot of effort researching the latest titanium high-tech bathing suit — which might add a second or two to your time — but wouldn’t it be a lot more effective to simply drop the weight belt?

Garlic has been prized for the last 5000 years as a marvelous healing remedy. Even Western medicine acknowledges garlic’s amazing ability to help lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of further heart attacks in cardiac patients. However, it’s also known for its ability to stimulate the immune response along with its antibiotic properties.¹

According to most studies, if you are over the age of 50 and don’t spend adequate time in the sunshine, you may be vitamin D deficient. Plus, as you may know, it can be difficult to get sufficient amounts of vitamin D from enriched foods. And now, more and more doctors just like me are questioning the outdated standards for healthy vitamin D supplementation.

In a new article published in the journal Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology,1 16 doctors and professors have challenged the Institute of Medicine’s Food and Nutrition Board’s (FNB) recommendations for the daily allowance of vitamin D.

“The 1997 FNB recommendations offend the most basic principles of pharmacology and toxicology, leading us to conclude that the current official guidelines and limitations for vitamin D intakes are scientifically indefensible,” the article’s authors state.

If I were asked to pick just one supplement for optimal joint health, I would have to go with fish oil.

Why fish oil? Well, fish oil contains EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), commonly referred to as omega-3 fatty acids or just omega-3’s. These omega-3 PUFAs have a number of beneficial effects on the body, including the joints.

In any type of arthritis, pain comes from two main sources:

1. Exposed and irritated nerves in the bone which are vulnerable to friction and chemical irritants when the protective cartilage layer is destroyed.
2. Inflammation which causes the synovial membrane of the joint to swell, grow, and produce excessive amounts of joint fluid (”water on the knee”).

Raise your champagne flute, and clink, Cheers! It is the time of year to celebrate, and most likely your holiday festivities will include alcohol. The holidays are the time for gaiety and celebration. So enjoy!

However, once the holidays are over and we are all settling back into our routine, it’s important to remember — when it comes to alcohol, moderation is the key.

As we enter the heart of cold and flu season, many of our patients want to know the best way to prevent coming down with these viruses. In my last article, I talked about whether flu shots really work. If you missed it, I said there is very little evidence that they do.

The best way to prevent flu or colds is to keep your overall health and immunity strong. That’s why you’ll see recommendations for making sure you dress warmly, get plenty of rest, and drink plenty of fluids. Good hand washing is another great preventive measure, but there is a ton of evidence that shows another sure-fire way to lower your chances of catching a nasty cold or debilitating flu — and it’s not one that you see discussed often.

Lower your stress.