A quick web search on the term “graceful aging” brings up phrases like:

“Combat the signs of aging…”

“Who said that we have to age…”

“Defy the aging process…”

More often than not, aging is viewed as something to be fought off for as long as possible. Regardless of how liberated we’ve become, many women and men still experience aging as a threat to their sense of self–worth and quality of life. It is pretty much expected that middle age will bring a “crisis” and far too often we hear seniors lament that “I thought these were supposed to be the golden years.” Whole industries are built on the attempt to stay young – from hair colors to face lifts to Viagra.

There is a place for all of these things, of course, but if your reaction to the aging process has you racing to beat time, take a deep breath, relax, and give yourself some space to shift into a different perspective on aging.

What if aging were equated with “getting better” rather than worse? What if you lived in a culture which reveres the elderly and views them as a repository of power and wisdom? What if it was understood that women really come into their greatness after menopause? Since how we age has so much to do with our attitudes and beliefs, such a shift in perspective could make a world of difference.

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I was so delighted to see a feature news report about Gluten, in this past Friday’s NBC Evening News.

As an integrative physician, I’ve been aware of the importance of gluten sensitivity for many years. However, until recently we did not really have a reliable accurate way to test to see if people are gluten sensitive.

This changed about a year ago when a new stool test that looks for gluten anybodies was released. For many months I used that test and found great benefit for my patients.

However now, the last six months, we have had available at the office a new extremely sensitive test for finding those patients who do NOT have Celiac Disease, but who are gluten sensitive. This test is run by Cyrex Labs, and you can read more about it on their site.

I have had some of the most gratifying complete successes in my practice in the last six months by identifying gluten sensitivity in patients with a list of problems that have baffled their conventional doctors.

If you think you are gluten sensitive, please to talk to me about it when you next see me for an appointment.

Of the people I test for gluten sensitivity somewhere between 50 and 60% of them do truly turn out to be gluten sensitive. Everybody asks why is gluten so much in the news?  Part of it is our expanding knowledge and recognition of the problems with gluten. However, another part of it is the food industry, who is hybridizing the wheat we eat in order to increase the gluten content. Supposedly a higher gluten content makes the bread taste better.

In any case people are now overwhelmed by an enormous amount of gluten when they consume wheat products. This accounts for part of the sensitivity. For if you expose a person to any allergen whether it’s pollen or gluten in a high enough concentration, their body will begin to react.

The important thing to remember with gluten sensitivity is that over 50% of people with gluten sensitivity do not have digestive symptoms. However, they have many other symptom complaints, that are not obviously connected with gluten.

Wheat Belly is a most informative book about how wheat causes obesity and is not your friend!

Without doing the blood test I mentioned above, you can test yourself for gluten sensitivity by 100% (not 99%) avoiding gluten for 6 to 8 weeks and then reintroducing it and see how you feel.I was very pleased by this short news snippet which you can watch HERE. They rightfully point out, which I point out to my patients, that a lot of gluten free foods at the “health food store” are full of other junk, including lots of sugar and fat. Be careful when something says gluten free on the label!

I hope this video is informative to you. I also would to refer you to my 3 part podcast interview of Dr Tom O’Bryan, and expert in gluten sensitivity. The first of these 3 podcasts is HERE

Two  weekends ago, I was very honored to be on a panel with Lissa Rankin, M.D., the author of the new bestseller Mind over Medicine. The two-hour panel discussion was held at Golden Bridge Yoga Center in Hollywood California.

It was organized by my friend Mastin Kipp and his website The Daily Love.

On the panel with me were Patricia Fitzgerld L.Ac., a Chinese medicine expert, Elisa Hallerman, addiction/recovery specialist, and Tommy Rosen, founder of Recovery 2.0, along with the author Lissa Rankin, M.D.

In Mind over Medicine, Lissa  reviews her own personal life as a physician. She worked in a traditional medical practice for many years. She was driven out of that because of the large number of  patients she had to see per day and a recognition that she could not give the patients what they were coming for.

She was then offered a job at an Integrative Medical Center in Northern California. This suited her much better as she was able to spend 45 minutes to an hour with each patient and really get to understand them. However she realized, for her, that she was not getting to the roots of the patients’ medical issues. She therefore began to read and study, and take a very close look at her own life.

Left to right in the above photo are Lissa Rankin, M.D. Dr Soram, Patricia Fitzgerld, L.Ac., Elisa Hallerman, Tommy Rosen and Mastin Kipp

She came to realize that many of the things in her life were not “right” for her-not true to her heart. This led her to leave the practice of medicine as she was doing it, and she began to work with people on a much much deeper level.

She came to realize that we need to attend to our emotional health, as well as tapping into our own wisdom and finding our own voices inside ourselves.

We, as Integrative Physicians,  are now realizing that consciousness, mind, and spirit are an essential part of healing and in this book Lissa shows why.

I feel that increasingly medicine will be going in this direction, specifically Energy Medicine, which can help us to heal our deepest emotions, which then allow our body to be healthy.

This book is packed with references from the traditional medical literature, documenting every step of the way what she is saying, about the need to heal our mind to hear our body. In her book, Lissa shows us our own internal healing powers and how we can use them to heal ourselves. She presents several cases of patients of hers who have had “spontaneous remissions” by using the techniques she shows in this book.

Lissa has withdrawn from the practice of medicine and does not see patients anymore. However she has created a huge training program, that is already oversubscribed, for medical doctors and other health practitioners to learn her techniques to integrate in their own practices.

I encourage all my patients and readers, to read and learn from this book. Also be sure to take a look at all the resources on her website HERE

I want to let my patients and my readers know that I too am (again) realizing the importance of healing the mind and emotions in order to heal the body. I’m studying this subject deeply. In the months ahead I look forward to sharing what I am learning with you.

Doesn’t it feel like summer is already blasting past?

On the first days of summer, the first thought that comes to many women’s minds (and some men’s minds too) is “how am I going to put on a bathing suit?” The fear of having to don revealing clothing in warm-weather months can trigger some women to adopt extreme diets, dangerously intense exercise routines or even prompt them to become depressed and unwilling to participate in fun summer activities with their friends and families.

What Causes a Negative Body Image?

Feeling unhappy about the way you look can start at a very young age. In fact, a recent study by University of Central Florida researchers found that nearly half of 3 to 6 year old girls surveyed said they worry about being fat, while one-third said they would change an aspect of their appearance, such as their weight or hair color.

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 A healthy sex life is undeniably an important part of a healthy lifestyle, and there is, in fact, research to prove it. Assuming it is done with a partner you can trust, and no sexually transmitted diseases are involved, the benefits of sexual relations include:

You both dream about sex, but you and your partner may have very different things in mind.

• Relief from depression and stress: “The release from orgasm does much to calm people. It helps with sleep, and that is whether we talk about solo sex or sex with a partner,” says Jennifer Bass, the head of information services at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana, in an MSNBC article.
• Reduced risk of heart disease: A study by researchers at Queens University in Belfast found that men who had sex three times a week or more reduced their risk of heart attack and stroke by half.
• Pain relief: Levels of the hormone oxytocin surge to five times their normal level right before orgasm, and this releases pain-relieving endorphins in your body.
• A strong immune system: An antibody that boosts your immune system, immunoglobulin A, is 30 percent higher in people who have sex once or twice a week, according to researchers from Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.
• A reduced risk of prostate cancer. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that frequent ejaculation is linked to a lower risk of prostate cancer.

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Sodium nitrite (or sodium nitrate) is widely used as a preservative, antimicrobial agent, color fixative and flavoring in cured meats and other products.

Why You May Want to Avoid Nitrites. Though this preservative has been studied for more than 50 years, there is still ongoing debate as to whether or not it’s harmful. Some experts say that the health claims against the preservative have “not been substantiated” while others recommend avoiding them in your diet entirely.

Numerous studies have found that nitrites contribute to a variety of negative health effects, which we’ve compiled here.

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Though the thought of counting calories and measuring portions doesn’t bring smiles to most people’s faces, many people succumb to such dieting measures because they believe it will improve their health.

However, according to a two-year study published in an issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, if you’re looking to achieve long-term health improvements, behavior changes and self-acceptance are more effective than dieting any day of the week.

The other half were assigned to a non-dieting group that focused on paying attention to internal body cues about hunger, letting go of restrictive “diet-like” eating habits and working with negative self-image. After two years, the researchers found:In the study of 78 obese women, aged 30-45, half were assigned to a dieting group, which focused on counting calories and fat content, restricting food consumption and monitoring their weight.

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Another article on fish oil was recently published saying that fish oil causes prostate cancer!

Many news outlets including Fox News, Health News, Nursing Times and CNN picked this study up and immediately warned people about a prostate cancer risk from taking fish oil.

Unfortunately, this was misrepresentation by the news media (once again). In point of fact, in the study no fish oil supplements, or any kind of supplement for that matter were were even given! What the study did was look at blood levels of long chain fatty acids such as those found in fish, in otherwise healthy people.

What the study did find was that there was an association between higher blood levels of DHA levels and prostate cancer. DHA is one component of fish oil. Again this was an associational study and certainly does not prove cause-and-effect. All the hysteria was just the news media wanting attention.

The lead scientist in the study Dr. Alan Krystal, from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle is quoted as saying “We’ve shown once again that use of nutritional supplements may be harmful”. How can he say that when fish oils were not even used in this study? One can only impute that he was using this as a way to criticize the use of supplements, which in my opinion is just reflective of a strong anti-supplement bias as well as a desire for shocking headlines by the author. There were NO supplements used in this study!

What to do?

As you can tell from the previous article, that shows no benefit for protecting against heart disease by taking fish oil, I’m not a big advocate of everybody continuing to take fish oil.

However I’ve gotten so many emails about this “Fish oil–Prostate Cancer” link, that I feel it only fair that I give you my perspective that this study does not show a relationship between taking fish oil and prostate cancer, because no fish oil was given!

In summary, I encourage all my patients and readers to learn more about the Parent Essential Oils, which I think is the future of our taking oil capsules for our health.

Let me know what you think. I look forward to being in dialogue with you about this.

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A recent major article in the New England Journal of Medicine has once again raised the question of whether there any benefit in taking fish oil to prevent heart disease.

This was a very large study with over 12,000 patients followed over five years. One group received fish oil supplements and one group received placebo.

The conclusion of this massive study was: “In a large general–practice cohort of patients with multiple cardiovascular risk factors, daily treatment with n-3 (fish oil) fatty acids did not reduce cardiovascular mortality and morbidity.”

Wow! What a shocking conclusion after all these years!

A very prestigious cardiologist Eric Toprol, M.D., from Scripps clinic in La Jolla California, who is also the editor-in-chief of the heart.org has posted a video blog HERE, where he reviews this study. I urge you to watch it.

A quote from the video is “I have an awful lot of patients who come to me on fish oil, and I implore them to stop taking it. The present study, with its efficacious dose, arms physicians with data to tell patients who have not had an MI (heart attack) and who don’t have heart failure, that n-3 fatty acid supplementation with fish oil is not effective.” Dr. Topol called fish a “no go”, and he noted that if the supplement had no effect in such a high risk patient population as in this study, it’s hard to imagine fish oil will provide any benefit in lower risk subjects.

He continued on to say “Fish oil does nothing. We can’t continue to argue that we didn’t give the right dose or the right preparation. It’s a nada effect”.

So what should we do about the Oil question?

My recommendation to the majority of my patients is to use Parent Essential Oils (PEOs). We use these oils very actively at the clinic and I invite you to ask me about them at your next office visit.

PEO’s are plant derived and there is a tremendous amount of evidence on how they protect us again Heart Disease, Cancer and Diabetes.

A new book called The PEO Solution is coming out in November 2013 that will review all the data in a layman’s language. You can get information on the book HERE. You can read chapter 7 of the book HERE.

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 Parents of teenagers are likely familiar with the array of media outlets — iPads, TV, cell phones, stereos, video games and computers — that many teens are glued to at all hours of the day.

The lure of these electronics may be damaging kids’ health, causing them to not get enough sleep, nor enough quality sleep, according to a poll of 1,000 teens conducted by the Sleep Council.

The survey of 12- to 16-year-olds found that:

• 30 percent of teens sleep just four to seven hours a night on school nights, instead of the recommended eight to nine hours.
• 23 percent say they fall asleep watching TV, listening to music or while using other electronics more than once a week.
• 19 percent admitted that leaving on the TV or computer impacted the quality of their sleep.
• 98.5 percent have a phone, music system or TV in their bedroom, and over 65 percent have all three.
• 40 percent say they generally feel tired.

 

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