Raw Honey that has never been heated above the normal temperature of the beehive is a miraculous energy food. When honey is heated above the hive temperature in order to easily fill it into bottles, the innumerable health benefits contained in it are destroyed. Raw honey is almost always crystallized or solid. Cooked honey loses its crystal structure and remains liquid. It is impossible for man to make or duplicate raw honey.

Raw honey contains enzymes such as invertase, diastase, catalase and inulase, which are aids to digestion and assimilation. It has all the B-complex vitamins, vitamin C, D, E, amino acids (great protein builders), proteins, plant pigments, aromatic compounds, healthful acids: acetic, citric, formic, malic, succinic. It contains simples sugars as glucose (also known as dextrose or grape sugar, the most basic sugar that directly goes into the blood stream without need of digestion), fructose (or levulose which is fruit sugar that is easily assimilated by the body), and small amounts of sucrose, dextrin, maltose and many minerals such as silica, iron, copper, manganese, chlorine, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, sulfur, and magnesium, and it contains some water. These trace minerals make raw honey a powerful blood builder when used as an everyday sweetener. It also soothes the digestive track. In contrast, refined sugar has been stripped of all nutritional value and is detrimental to health when consumed on a daily basis.

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Posted by Vitamin Z at 01:26 PM | Permalink

Though most of our tomatoes come from Florida, the state isn't necessarily the best place to grow the crop... Most tomatoes are grown in sand, which contains few nutrients and organic materials. In addition, Florida's humidity breeds large populations of insects, which means tomato growers need to apply chemical pesticides on a weekly basis.

"In order to get a successful crop of tomatoes, the official Florida handbook for tomato growers lists 110 different fungicides, pesticides and herbicides that can be applied to a tomato field over the course of the growing season," he says. "And many of those are what the Pesticide Action Network calls 'bad actors' — they're kind of the worst of the worst in the agricultural chemical arsenal."

Florida applies more than eight times the amount of pesticide and herbicides as does California, the next leading tomato grower in the country. Part of this has to do with the fact that California processes tomatoes that are used for canning — and therefore don't have to look as good as their Florida counterparts. But part of this also has to do with consumers.

"It's the price we pay for insisting we have food out of season and not local," he says. "We foodies and people in the sustainable food movement chant these mantras, 'local, seasonable, organic, fair-trade, sustainable,' and they almost become meaningless because they're said so often and you see them in so many places. If you strip all those away, they do mean something, and what they mean is that you end up with something like a Florida tomato in the winter — which is tasteless."

Continue reading "How Industrial Farming 'Destroyed' The Tasty Tomato" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 11:04 AM | Permalink

The pharmaceutical manufacturing giant Pfizer disclosed that it paid more than $20 million to 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals for consulting and speaking on its behalf in the last six months of 2009. In other words, those 4,500 doctors gave talks that forwarded the interests of drugs sold by Pfizer, and they performed consultations with an eye to selling Pfizer products in the deal. The sales angle did not necessarily need to be announced, meaning that attendees at the talks given by these doctors and those accepting consultations thought they were getting unbiased help. During that same period, Pfizer also paid $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centers and other research groups to sponsor clinical trials of their products.

Source

Posted by Vitamin Z at 06:10 AM | Permalink

Over 460,000 people per year are now dying of a disorder called of sudden cardiac death according to CDC statistics. This is a condition striking otherwise healthy people, who have experienced no obvious symptoms of heart disease prior to their deaths. An alarming number of these deaths are occurring in young athletes, both in high schools, colleges, as well as among professional athletes.

While cardiologists have found coronary disease and suspect previous scars from silent heart attacks in a number of these individuals, one mechanism is getting no attention at all, and that is excitotoxic damage caused by food additives and the artificial sweetener aspartame. This is despite growing evidence that the excitotoxic mechanism plays a major role in cardiac disease.

Previously, it was thought that excitotoxin food additives, such as monosodium glutamate and aspartic acid in aspartame, cause their damage in the cardiovascular centers in the brain stem and/or by over stimulating sympathetic centers in the hypothalamus of the brain. Both of these mechanisms have been shown to result in sudden cardiac death in experimental animals.

Continue reading "Sudden Cardiac Death and Food Excitotoxin Additives" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 06:19 AM | Permalink

Dr. Strand: Well, what happened was that my wife had suffered from a disease called fibromyalgia chronic fatigue, and we had lived with this for twenty-plus years. In the 80s and 90s, she just started to go downhill. Every year, she got worse and suffered more pain and more fatigue. In 1995, she came down with serious pneumonia, and we were able to get through that, but she was left with serious chronic fatigue; she really couldn’t get out of bed for more than one to two hours a day. This went on month after month after month, and in spite of seeing four different specialists and being placed on nine different medications, she really did not improve. I didn’t get much hope from the doctors.

Well, at that time, someone gave my wife some nutritional supplements -- which I strongly did not believe in at that time. I was a typical doctor, and I thought that it would just create expensive urine or be a waste of money. But I told my wife, "Honey, you could try anything," because we were just not helping. When that happens to your family, it really hits home, being a physician. I have to admit that, within weeks, she got better. Within months, she was off of all of her medications, and within about five or six months, she was better than she had been in nine or ten years. That got my interest and caught my attention, and that’s when I started researching. So I have been researching nearly ten years…

Continue reading "Interview with Dr. Ray Strand" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 09:44 AM | Permalink

Posted by Vitamin Z at 12:01 PM | Permalink

Here are the details:

VITAMIN E: When fed on grass, cattle take in around 15 times more vitamin E per day than they do on a typical concentrate diet, and levels on the meat can be between two and three times higher as a result.

BETA CAROTENE: is an anti-oxidant and vitamin A precursor, and given grass fed beef a rich yellow colored fat rather than Crisco-white colored fat. Grass fed beef contains up to 5.5 times more beta carotene compared to grain finished beef and cattle fed fresh growing grass contained up to 11 times more than cattle fed dried forages. In fact, the levels of beta carotene can decline up to 97% during grain feeding.

CONJUGATED LINOLEIC ACID (CLA) Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) is a nutrient found in the fat of ruminant animals that feed on green grass. Researchers are excited about CLA because it is anti-carcinogenic at much lower dosages than many other naturally occurring anti-carcinogens. Grass finished beef has three to five times the amount of CLA as grain fed beef.

Research suggests CLA may:

1. Prevent breast cancer especially when present during mammary tissue development
2. Suppress other cancers
3. Inhibit and reduce atherosclerosis (plaque buildup in the arteries)
4. Lower LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the blood
5. Induce a relative decrease in body fat and increase in lean muscle mass
6. Increase bone health and formation
7. Normalize or reduce blood glucose levels and control and possibly prevent diabetes
8. Enhance immune system function
9. Combat allergies and asthma

Continue reading "Grain Fed vs. Grass Fed Beef" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 04:45 PM | Permalink

Acupuncture works better than drugs like aspirin to reduce the severity and frequency of chronic headaches, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

A review of studies involving nearly 4,000 patients with migraine, tension headache and other forms of chronic headache showed that that 62 percent of the acupuncture patients reported headache relief compared to 45 percent of people taking medications, the team at Duke University found.

"Acupuncture is becoming a favorable option for a variety of purposes, ranging from enhancing fertility to decreasing post-operative pain, because people experience significantly fewer side effects and it can be less expensive than other options," Dr. Tong Joo Gan, who led the study, said in a statement.

"This analysis reinforces that acupuncture also is a successful source of relief from chronic headaches."

Writing in Anesthesia and Analgesia, they said 53 percent of patients given true acupuncture were helped, compared to 45 percent receiving sham therapy involving needles inserted in non-medical positions.

"One of the barriers to treatment with acupuncture is getting people to understand that while needles are used, it is not a painful experience," Gan said. "It is a method for releasing your body's own natural painkillers."

Continue reading "Acupuncture Beats Aspirin for Chronic Headache" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 09:18 AM | Permalink

Wine has enjoyed a volatile reputation over the years. Considered sacred in ancient Egypt, it became sinful during the prohibition, an elitist indulgence in the post-war years, a health hazard in the 1960's, and finally a healthy tonic that delivered antioxidants and heart health in recent decades. But now, some disturbing news may cause wine to undergo yet another redefinition.

According to a study out of Kingston University in London, many wines contain heavy metals up to 200 times the amount considered safe. The researchers measured "Target Hazard Quotients (THQ)" in wines from 15 countries throughout Europe, South America, and the Middle East. A THQ of one or more is considered unsafe, but according to the researchers, most wines came in at a whopping 50 to 200. To give you perspective, seafood considered dangerous usually falls between a THQ of one and five.

The Environmental Protection Agency established guidelines for safe levels of heavy metals based on frequent, long-term exposure, so ostensibly, drinking one glass of wine with a high THQ won't have much impact on your health; drinking a glass every night for years most certainly will. Underlining this contention, Dr. Weiss of the University of Rochester commented: "Any time you see numbers like they have in this study, you begin to scratch your head and wonder about the effects over a long period of ingestion: Not one glass of wine last Tuesday, but a glass a day over a lifetime."

Continue reading "Heavy Metals and Pesticides in Wine" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 01:59 PM | Permalink