Our bodies require so many nutrients to function optimally that filling our daily diet with empty calories will gaurantee nutritional deficiencies. Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped junk food manufacturers from filling their foods with both refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup. What’s worse, the industry behind these foods has launched expensive ad campaigns claiming their priducts are “natural” and “harmless.” Dr. Mercola recently wrote an excellent article regarding the true dangers of consuming sugar and high fructose corn syrup. An excerpt from teh article can be found below. To read the entire article, just follow the link below.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/03/23/nutrition-experts-battle-industry-groups-over-sugar.aspx
“There’s a heated debate going on over the health risks of consuming too much sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and other caloric sweeteners.
On one side are leading nutrition experts, who believe that these sweeteners add empty calories to people’s diets and promote weight gain.
Emerging scientific research indicates that consuming too much of these sweeteners may increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and other health problems.
On the other side are industry groups representing sugar and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). They claim that their products are natural and don’t cause weight gain or health problems. And they have launched advertising and marketing campaigns to spread this idea.
The American Heart Association is on the nutrition experts’ side. The group recently issued a scientific statement saying that high intake of added sugars is implicated in many poor health conditions, including obesity, high blood pressure and other risk factors for heart disease and stroke.” – www.mercola.com
Unfortunately, air pollution is a reality for all of us. It is produced by so many of the modern conveniences we use very day – cars, electricity and power plants (just to name a few). We are only now even beginning to understand how much of a health concern this air pollution is.
“Research consistently is finding that, when spread out over a given population, the quality of the air has a very significant impact on public health. When vehicles, factories, power plants, and other machines burn fuel, the chemicals they release into the atmosphere react with one another (and other compounds in the air) in ways that can amplify health hazards.
One major study, which followed subjects for 16 years, found that people living in cities with higher levels of fine particulates were at greater risk of cardiovascular death. A difference of 10 micrograms per cubic meter increased the risk of dying from ischemic heart disease (narrowed arteries) by 18 percent, arrhythmia by 13 percent, and cardiac arrest by 21 percent. It seems air pollutants incite processes that lead to high blood pressure, blood clotting, and electrical instability in your heart.
Air pollution might actually cause disease as well. Separate Children ages 9 to 16 who played at least three sports and lived in areas with high ozone concentrations had a 30 percent increased chance of developing asthma. And other work indicates that infants whose mothers were exposed to air pollutants while pregnant might be at a greater risk of low birth weight, pre-term birth, and even death.” – www.mercola.com
The good news is that with the use of Standard Process whole food supplements, we can assist your body in better handling the enormous number of toxins it is exposed to every day. If you are concerned about exposure to things like air pollution, please call our office for more information on the healthy, safe and effective purification programs we can help you with.
Obesity among children is on the rise, and this is a big concern for our entire country. With healthcare costs already on the rise, having generations of children suffering from obesity gaurantees that healthcare costs will continue to go up. In addition, children who suffer from obesity are at a significantly greater risk for conditions such as Type II Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gout, heart disease and certain types of cancers. Our bodies simply cannot operate optimally when we carrying large amounts of extra weight and this is especially dangerous for children. Their bodies are growing, their brains and organ systems are still developing. If their bodies can’t perform optimally during years of critical development, their health will suffer for the rest of their lives. Dr. Joseph Mercola recently wrote an article discussing one of the reasons children are suffering from obesity so much these days. The link to this article can be found below.
For more information on how to put together a healthy, balanced diet please contact our office.
http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvotes/archive/2010/02/17/childhood-obesity–its-not-the-amount-of-tv-its-the-number-of-junk-food-commercials.aspx
