Archived News of the Week

General Guidelines for Healthy Living
(Newsletter #1 out of 4)

Regarding Water

Drink plenty of pure, filtered water during the day - 1 liter for every 50 lbs. For example, if you weighed 150 lbs, you would drink 3 liters of water daily. The older you get, the less your thirst barometer works, so just be sure to drink a certain healthy amount each day. If you feel thirsty, you are way beyond needing to have a glass of water. Think of tap water as POISON. Do not drink it if at all possible. Water filtration can be expensive, so you could do a couple of affordable things instead. You could get bottled water delivered to your home and office. You could buy a Brita filter for your fridge. You could get a Pur filter which fits easily over any faucet. You could also go a bit upscale and buy a reverse osmosis system and have it installed. That would be about $250, but it is nice because after it's installed you don't worry about it except changing the filters every 6 months or so. Home Depot has them. Then there is an alkaline water machine which is upwards of 3K. Maybe Brita would be a nice reasonable start for you?

Please note: Water is water is water. Water is not Coke. Water is not iced tea. Water is not any other liquid other than water. If you put juice into your water, it is no longer water. You can, however, put lemon or lime slices into your water without disturbing its water-ness. Mineral water with a slice of lemon is a good before dinner and party drink. Not only will you be the popular designated driver, but you will be happily alkalinizing yourself while everyone else at the party is much too happily acidifying themselves.

I used to suggest carrying Nalgene bottles with water in them, but there is so much controversy going on now about plastic that ideally you would carry water in glass or stainless even though this tends to be awkward and heavy. Whatever you get, carry it with you at all times. If you do carry plastic, do not freeze water in it because that will leech the nasty phthalates out of the plastic and into your water.

Suggestion #1: Try to eat nothing in a bag, box, jar, can or wrapper. Shop and cook as much as you can from the foodstuffs in the bins and produce section.

Regarding Sugar

Sugar is the worst possible thing for you. Oh, wait a minute, maybe smoking crack is a bit worse. Sugar is a poison which has destroyed cultures and civilizations and it will destroy your health. For just one of the many bad things about sugar - cancer cells LOVE sugar; it suits their anaerobic chemical reactions perfectly, feeds the yeast in the cancer cells and tears down your immune system all at the same time. Anyone who has had cancer and is interested in preventing cancer should never, ever touch sugar of any kind.

It might be difficult to eliminate sugar and you may even experience a detox reaction, just like you would from detoxing from any other kind of poison. Good news. Your immediate misery will last - tops - three days, so pick a convenient 3 days and detoxify yourself once and for all from white sugar. After this you will stop craving sugar and carbs and your life will become much more peaceful and healthy. Be sure and read labels and discard any product that has sugar of any kind in the top 5 ingredients. Sugar has many different names as the manufacturers have become even sneakier to push their addictive sugary products. Here are some sneaky names which really mean sugar: Brown sugar, sucrose, glucose, maltose, succinate, molasses, date sugar, beet sugar, grape sugar, cane sugar, corn syrup, HFCS, corn sugar, fruit juice concentrate, sorbitol, barley malt, caramel, carob syrup, maltodextrin, dextran, dextrose, sorghum syrup.

So be aware of these underhanded tricks from the food industry and watch out for it as you are reading EVERY label before you buy your occasional bag, box, jar, can or wrapper. Caveat: Organic canned beans and tomatoes are fine in a pinch, but it's better (tasting, too) to use the organic dried beans and the actual organic Roma tomatoes for sauces.

Here's a bit of bad news for you party animals. Alcohol is sugar and probably the worst kind since we metabolize it so fast. In an ideal world, you would stop drinking alcohol totally. Otherwise, just have a drink on that special occasion. That glass of wine every night is not really all that good for you and if you are going to drink something, stick to low glycemic alcohol which is almost an oxymoron, but here's an example of what I mean: Margaritas are bad. Dry red wine is better. Manhattans are bad. An ounce of gin or vodka is better. Beer is bad, period.

What about fake sugars like Saccharin or NutraSweet. Duh, of course, they are bad for you and even turn into nasty formaldehyde in your body which means that you will be embalmed before your time. Remember that Diet Coke, our national drink, is made with aspartame AKA NutraSweet. Splenda is not good either because it's just sugar with a chlorine molecule attached and no one knows how that single chlorine molecule will disrupt your body over time. However, if faced with a choice of a pink, blue or yellow packet and someone is holding a gun to my head, I would pick real sugar first, then the yellow, then pink and then no thank you, no blue at all, ever.

Now that most of us know how bad NutraSweet is (headaches, strokes, cancer, neurological disorders etc.), the company that manufactures it (Ajinomoto) will be renaming it. Yes, it's horribly deceptive, but NutraSweet will now be called AminoSweet. Don't fall for it and tell all your friends and loved ones to beware.

The jury is still out on Cargill's (big chemical conglomerate) Truvia, but it seems to me that it is reasonable from what I know about it at the time of this writing (March, 2010). However, it is "processed" in a "factory, so I don't really know...

Go into your kitchen right now and throw away everything that has sugar - whatever its name is - in the first 5 ingredients on the label, plus anything at all with aspartame or NutraSweet in it. Throw away all the pink, blue and yellow packets. You will be going a long way towards eliminating the toxic food environment in your body if you start with this small act.

Next time we will look at carbohydrates and fats.

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