Wednesday, January 26, 2011

How To Eat Fish To Benefit Your Health!

My patients and I are lucky. We live in an area surrounded by the ocean and several big lakes. Not only is it a beautiful environment but it is home to one of the best foods you can eat, fish, which is abundant here. There are many great fish restaurants in this area that are always packed with customers who love it. In fact, fish is one of the best foods you can eat for good health. It is full of protein, potassium, and heart and joint healthy Omega-3 fats.
However, because my patients like to eat fish so much, it's important to make them aware that not all fish are equal - in their health benefits that is. While they can be full of good nutrition, some have the ability to absorb too much mercury and pass it along when consumed.
Let me share with you my advice to patients about what kind, and how much, fish you can safely eat to be sure you are getting the most health benefit from it.
Choosing The Most Beneficial Fish
Fish is naturally one of Nature's perfect foods. It's lean, full of protein, and an excellent source of omega-3 oils that reduce inflammation in your body and protect against cardiovascular disease and arthritis. Fish also keeps your skin and joints lubricated and reduces cholesterol. One fish oil, in particular, DHA, helps babies neuro-pathways and cognition to develop correctly.
Fish like wild Alaskan salmon, tiny krill, and yellowfin tuna, have high levels of these beneficial Omega-3 oils. In addition, they are good sources of potassium, a mineral many people do not get enough of! Potassium aids energy and muscle function as well as prevents metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
With all of these good nutritional, health preserving things that fish has going for it, just like my patients, you may be tempted to eat a lot of it, thinking if a little is good, more must be phenomenal! Well, with fish, not so much.
In fact, when I talk to my patients about eating fish, I like to emphasize two important concepts - moderation and avoidance. Now, those two terms may seem contradictory, but in eating fish there are many that you can eat in moderation and other fish that you should avoid altogether. Why? Because of their mercury content.
All fish contain a certain amount of mercury which you process as a toxin that eventually clears from your body. Light to moderate consumption of certain types of fish should pose no problem for you. As I counsel my patients, your risk of Hg (mercury) toxicity increases with the types and amounts of fish you consume.
Here's a list I pass along to my patients from what the US EPA and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recommend to decrease your mercury exposure from eating fish:
• Avoid shark, King mackerel, swordfish, tilefish, grouper, Marlin, orange roughy, lake bass, walleye - these have the highest levels of Hg.
• Limit white albacore tuna to 18 oz a month - it contains more Hg than light tuna.
• Limit saltwater bass, croaker, halibut, bluefin tuna, sea trout, Maine lobster to 18 oz a month. These have moderate levels of Hg.
• Limit Carp, Mahi-Mahi, crab, snapper, perch, cod, monkfish to 24 oz a month. These have lower levels of Hg.
• Shrimp, sardines, canned light tuna, wild Alaskan salmon, pollock, whitefish, and catfish, black cod - these have the lowest levels of Hg. You can enjoy up to 12 ounces a week.
Get The Most Benefit From Your Fish
If you stay within the guidelines recommended above for what types and how much fish to consume, you'll be getting a lot of benefit out of your fish-eating experiences. However, there are several other things you can do to optimize the benefits of eating fish and to help neutralize some of the drawbacks of eating it:
• Add some fermented foods to your diet - things like yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, help remove toxins, like mercury, from your body through creating good gut bacteria.
• Adequate amounts of antioxidants like Vitamin C, E, and resveratrol - help prevent damaging oxidation effects of mercury.
• Add some natural chelators to your diet - things like garlic, selenium, cilantro, and chlorella. These substances bind to toxins like mercury and move them out of your body.
• Adequate fiber intake - sweeps the colon clean and lessens levels of mercury accumulation.
• Supplement - you can get the good benefits of eating fish with none of the bad by taking Omega-3 fish oil supplements, like those that come from fish such as krill, which are abundant in these oils.
Eating a variety of fish is a delightful experience, which delivers a lot of health benefits. We need to follow the guidelines listed above, though, to avoid mercury toxicity, which can cause a multitude of health problems, including depression, kidney disease, fertility problems and Alzheimer's. With a little common sense, however, we can still enjoy eating the seafood we love so much without concern of toxicity!

How One Can Create A Complete Or High Quality Protein Intake To Grow Taller And Build Lean Muscle

We have been led to believe that any meat is a good protein source. Wrong! Cured ham has only 16 percent protein; hot dogs, only 7 percent, less than dried skim milk, which has over 34 percent, or sunflower seeds with 27 percent; lentils have more than 23 percent protein. And while all we need to satisfy our protein needs is a 8 ounces of complete high-quality protein a day, we are getting far more than that. It is understood that incomplete proteins alone do not provide an adequate diet. But one can create complete, or high-quality, proteins by combining foods so that those that are low in some amino acids are eaten together with ones that are high in those same acids.
These complementary proteins-all from plant sources-are in this way completed and so can supply protein needs quite nicely. You just have to know how. Soy beans, for example, are low in the amino acid tryptophan, but high in lysine. To enhance their biological values to grow taller, combine them with complementary proteins like nuts, grains, and seeds, which are low in lysine but high in tryptophan.
In countless combinations, they can make satisfying, delicious dishes. Tofu, for example, made by curdling soy bean milk and packing the solids in layers of cloth, has a protein value-in terms of completeness, digestibility and other factors-only slightly less than animal flesh. It can be made even higher in quality by combining it with grains such as brown rice. Soy bean sprouts and soy flour can also be used in cooking to enhance the complementary values of other foods.
Other legumes, like chick-peas, lentils, and various kinds of beans, are low in certain amino acids, but high in others. They also can be combined with grains, nuts, and seeds to form complementary proteins of high nutritional value to grow taller. Consider, after all, how the rest of the world, which has not had the luxury of high meat diets, subsists. Central American and Caribbean nations use beans and rice as staples. Middle Eastern countries combine sesame paste with chick-peas, while Italians mix lentils, chick-peas, and other beans with pasta. Grains and cereals make ideal complements to legumes because they are generally high in tryptophan and low in isoleucine and lysine.
Grains and cereals supply half the world's protein and are great sources of fibre, too. They do not need to be complemented with meat products to raise the protein values. The myth has been that cereals, grains, and seeds are incomplete, poor sources of protein even when combined. This is false. When you combine grains, seeds and legumes, you can easily exceed animal protein quality to grow taller and rebuild numerous tissues.

Discover a List of Good Fats To Start Eating and Improve Your Health and Well Being

One of the most important things you can do if you want to improve your health is get a list of good fats and start including them into your daily diet.
I started doing this myself many months ago and feel tremendously better for having done it.
Also, in this article, I'd like to dispel some health myths regarding fats that are preventing people from achieving the good health they deserve.
First, here's a list of good fats you should start shopping for: olive oil, fish oil (supplements), coconut oil (extremely healthy, and the best oil to cook foods with), eggs (cage free), fish (fatty species only like salmon, tuna, hoki, sardines), avocados, nuts like almonds and walnuts, any grass fed or free range meat (beef, chicken, lamb), and flaxseed oil.
Now, some of those good fats are particularly rich in omega 3 fats, which are vital for good health. Fatty fish and fish oil supplements made from them, for example, are probably the number one source.
What I also want to point out is the health myth that has been going around for many years that all saturated fats are bad and only unsaturated fats are good for you. This is nonsense and is doing a lot of people a lot of disservice who are listening to this advice.
For example, eggs are one of nature's most perfect foods and yet they are a source of saturated fats. Coconut oil is probably the healthiest oil one can consume and cook with and it's largely saturated fat. Do some research yourself on these or talk to a naturopathic doctor and you'll discover the truth for yourself.
Of course the monounsaturated fats can be good for you, too, and I listed some of them above.
Other fats occur in oils such as canola, peanut, or sunflower and safflower oil. I avoid these because they are high in omega 6 and 9.
Although we need some omega 6 and 9, most of us already get way too much of it. We actually need to increase our omega 3 to omega 6 and 9 ratio. Some natural health experts believe this ratio is out of balance because of our modern diets. They strongly believe this unbalanced ratio is what has caused so many health problems for so many people.
Unfortunately, if you read product labels, like most salad dressings or what kinds of oils go into snacks like chips and cookies, it's exactly these types of oils like canola, sunflower, safflower or soybean. Please cut back on them, or at least take a highly purified, concentrated fish oil supplement daily to help bring your ratio back into a healthier balance.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Exercise Increases Testosterone and Cures Depression Without Any Drugs

There's a complex set of things that go into making up this thing we call a body. Indeed just as Einstein conceived of there not being separate things of time and space, that they are time-space as two parts of the same phenomenon, it is appropriate to see the mind and body as two parts of the same paradigm and that whatever impacts on one is also impacting on the other. That is, improving your physical health will have a direct relationship on improving your mental health to the same degree, and the same is true in reverse. The medical professional has turned many tens of millions of Americans into prescription drug addicts and continues to make many billions of dollars from the goldmine known as depression. Thousands of people die every year because the first attempt to medicate suffers of depression were made much worse and suicide because of the drugs prescribed. The real truth about depression is that exercise is the only thing needed to solve depression once and for all times and that making drug addicts is only useful for the drug company's bottom line profits.
The direct impact of exercise on the body has a corresponding positive influence on people's mental health, and all that any sufferer of depression needs is a good friend to drag the person off of the sofa and onto the street to walk briskly every day for an hour which will cause the depression to fall away and into a distant memory. The reason for this to be true is all related to testosterone because the increased exercise feeds into increased testosterone production which feeds into increased motivation and zest and vigor for life. With increased testosterone production becoming the essential part of the daily cycle, there is no more depression and within just 2 or 3 weeks there is nothing but positive energy and a routine cycle of increase and largess.

Things To Appreciate When You Are Not Feeling Well

From time to time we all get a little under the weather. You may come down with an upset stomach after a badly organised barbecue or you may have caught the flu from someone coughing uncontrollably on your bus. But chances are at least once a year you will get ill in some way so it is a good idea to be prepared for this inevitable situation. This does not mean getting a stockpile of painkillers, stomach settlers and menthol sweets together (though this may be a good idea too), this means preparing yourself mentally for this happening to you so that while you are sat in bed feeling sorry for yourself, you are able to appreciate things opposed to just being depressed.
First you should appreciate your health the rest of the time. When you're lying in a puddle of sweat, surrounded by used tissues and your back is killing you, you may be ready to throw in the towel and say goodbye to this cruel world. What you should do instead is start making plans for when you are better. Write a list, call and make arrangements with friends and speak to your loved ones about stuff you want to do. This way you won't feel so trapped and you can appreciate that life will continue before too long has passed. Sadly there are always people worse off than you.
It is a sad fact that no matter how poorly you are feeling there is always someone sicker and more depressed than you. This is not meant to make you feel better, it is meant to give you some inspiration to help you to help yourself. While the impulse when your ill is to think of yourself as the last sick person forsaken in the boondocks you need to remember that people get sick all the time and come through it and get back to their life again.
Doctors don't know everything. You need to keep your mind open to some alternative natural herbal remedies which can make a difference for some people when they are suffering from certain illnesses. Choosing to buy 5 Htp or Triphala for their respective properties is something which a doctor may not advise but then they have proven health benefits so it can't hurt to give them a try and see if they will help you.
Don't just lie there feeling down, try to appreciate all these things. Get well soon!

Life Is Not That Hard - If You Boost Your Testosterone Level

In the 1970s Australia had a Prime Minister by the name of Malcolm Fraser and he coined the phrase "life was not meant to be easy" when he advised the Australian public that the government must increase taxes and reduce services and all that phony nonsense that governments do when extorting more money from the general public. And thereafter many others coined the rebuttal of for example "Yeah Malcolm, but life wasn't meant to be this hard". It seems clear to me that most people would are grossly obese don't want to be however they don't know how to change their situation in life. Most have tried every diet under the sun, having parted with a great deal of head-earned money in the process. Many have also resorted to stomach staples and liposuction and to me it is a real worry that some of the nastiest surgical treatments ever devised have been in the name of improving health and medical science and seems even more drastic than any Hannibal Lector could have devised.
The simple facts of the matter are that most people are obese because they have extra low levels of testosterone, especially when compared to the average in men only 80 years ago when most men had much more physical labor jobs and few cars to drive. The low testosterone levels translate into low levels of motivation, activity and exercise, which not only reduces muscle-mass and increases body fat, the reduced exercise level compounds the low testosterone problem even further with ultimately very dangerously low levels of androgenic hormones then being produced. Within a few short years, morbid obesity has set in and the issues are becoming very serious and life threatening.
To change the trend of all this, a person only needs to start their day with seven minutes of high intensity weights training which will cause the body to make more testosterone. Each day this seven minutes stays the same, but because the weights get easier, heavier weights must be used to keep the brain increasing the total testosterone level.

Growing Taller Exercises - Increasing Your Height Naturally

There are plenty of methods to increase your height and they can be put into two groups; natural and man-made. Man-made methods include using creams, herbs and machines to try and stimulate your human growth hormone which is just a waste of time and money as some don't even work. You want to use natural methods to increase your height such as growing taller exercises.
The average person can gain about two inches of height naturally but when filled with determination you can go on to grow up to 6 inches taller! All you need is determination, time and to put effort into this and you will soon find that you will start changing in no time at all.
The main places you want to focus on when looking to gain height is your spine and your legs, these two areas both have the ability to stretch through proper exercises and stretches which will in turn make you capable of growing taller naturally.
When it comes to looking at the spine the first thing you want to do about it is to improve your posture. Your spine has to deal with carry a load as you walk around and it down so you want to make sure that you can improve your posture and give your spine the ability to lengthen out. When standing you want to keep your back straight and to avoid carrying too much weight that may ruin it. When sitting down you want to keep your back straight on the chair and avoid slouching over. Finally when you are sleeping you want to lie down flat on your back which will relieve the pressure and stress off your spine that it has dealt with for the whole day.
The next part you want to look at is the legs. The shin bones and the thighs are the two areas that are able to help you gain more height so you want to target these areas. The best way to do this would be through growing taller exercises. You want to perform these exercises 30-60 minutes a day for about 5 days a week with rest periods included.
By being dedicated to put the time and effort everyday for this then in no time you will soon reach your goal of increasing your height.
Make sure that you take a look into growing taller exercises as there are specific exercises that should be used to help you increase your height. However if you want to really see the results you will need to use a height increase program that you can follow daily for a period of time. Check out GrowingTallerForIdiots for a step-by-step idiot proof way to grow taller naturally ("The Height Stuff") that is GUARANTEED to have you up to 6 inches taller! Start today and see results in as little as 3 days!