Saturday, January 8, 2011

Vitamin E: What Is It Good For? Absolutely Everything.

The Vitamins and Nutrition Center reports that:
. . . Vitamin E is naturally an oil, and is (compared to other nutrients) a bit expensive, so many pill-based multi-vitamins skimp and give you a very small amount (40-60 IU's) of vitamin E a day.  Your average Centrum Performance gives you just 60 IU's a day--so consider extra supplementation or find a high quality multivitamin that gives you 400 IU's instead of just 40 or 60.  Why?  As just one example, the clinical benefits of Vitamin E's protective effect against Alzheimer's disease does not appear until at least 400 IU's a day, even though the US RDA is just 30 IU's per day.

Dr. Mercola's comments on Vitamin E are useful.

The remarkable powers of natural Vitamin E are now known:

Powerful Effect #1:  This article explains how Vitamin E prevents the destructive effects of lead in the cells.

Power Effect #2:  Top 10 Foods Highest in Vitamin E with wheat germ being the highest.

Powerful Effect #3:  Maria S. from Sacramento writes: "I took 4,000 IU of a high-quality vitamin E every day for six weeks to eliminate liver spots on my face that had developed."

Powerful Effect #4:  Carolyn from Pittsburgh writes, "I left it alone, and remembered being told that vitamin E can cause cysts to go away. It worked and when the cyst came back a year later, I went straight to the vitamin E bottle, and next doctor appointment, there was no signs of the cyst."

Powerful Effect #5:  It is an antipollutant for the lungs.  It helps the healing of scar tissue when taken internally and also when applied externally.

Here is what the National Institutes of Health has to say about Vitamin E.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Wheat Berry Vs. Refined Wheat Products

Margaret Durst explains that "Wheat used to be considered the staff of life, but now, thanks to processing, it is a dead and detrimental food. When you compare white flour to the wheat berry, processing removes 66 percent of the B vitamins, 70 percent of the minerals, 79 percent of the fiber, and 19 percent of the protein."

She adds, "What is left is a “food” that forces the body to rob itself of essential minerals in order to be digested. Once these mineral stores are depleted, the “food” will ferment into the perfect environment for yeast, bacteria and parasites to grow, leading to indigestion, gas and bloating."

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Low Doses of Radiation Keep the DNA Repair Mechanisms in Good Working Order

I had to post this.  Excerpted from a very good article on Art Robinson and "Hormesis."

Now we have the "hormesis" data, gathered in the last 20 years, and that's what interests Robinson. The graph does not go straight back to zero. It goes down to about 700 millirems a day, then heads back up again, like a hook. Low background levels of radiation seem to be good for you. The evidence that the "linear extrapolation to zero" is wrong, accumulated by Bernard L. Cohen, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, comes from many sources. Bad for you in large doses, radiation does some good in small doses. It seems to keep the DNA repair mechanisms in good working order. The same principle is observed with alcohol, and a number of other poisons. Very heavy drinking will kill you, but a glass of wine a day is a tonic.

With radiation, nonetheless, the operative principle has been "zero tolerance," permitting environmentalists not just to stop nuclear tests, but to demonize nuclear power and to stymie the disposal of nuclear waste as well—with little discussion of the evidence. As the recent energy problems on the West Coast suggest, we are going to have to start building nuclear power plants again. Meanwhile, Art ruefully points out, the hormesis data show that Oregon is not a particularly good place to live. Its background radiation levels are below the national average, and its cancer rates are above average. There's less cancer risk in Denver, where the background radiation levels are much higher. That inverse relationship holds all over the country.






Green Leaves & Tops of Plants: It's Where the Nutrients Are.

Taken from Chapter 5 "Why Is It Hard to Love Greens?" of Victoria Boutenko's Green for Life 

Green leaves were never included into our food pyramids as a separate group because humans never looked at them as real food.  Carrot tops have several times more nutrition than the roots, but the opinion that greens are for rabbits, sheep, and cows, has been preventing us from eating carrot tops in our salads.  We routinely throw away the most nutritious part of the carrot plant!  The roots are much more palatable to human taste than the tops because the roots contain significantly more sugar and water.  The tops are bitter from the abundant amount of nutrients in them.

Curcumin Inhibits Alzheimer's Disease

Curcumin is the Indian spice Tumeric.

Dr. Barry Sears says,

NAC is a hydrophobic derivative of amino acid cysteine. It is only this hydrophobic derivative that can cross the blood brain barrier to enter into the brain. Other hydrophobic polyphenols, such as curcumin, can also do this. This is why high dietary intakes of curcumin are related to reduced incidence of Alzheimer's.