Americans drink more than 216 liters of carbonated soft drinks each year, a number that continues to increase at an alarming rate. Many people use low-calorie diet soda in a futile effort to lose weight, yet find that these drinks have the opposite effect leading them to be overweight or obese. The high acid content in most carbonated beverages leaches calcium and other critical nutrients from the bone and tissues, significantly increasing disease risk over years of consumption.
Researchers from Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Instituteand Harvard University have reported the result of a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the first to examine soda’s affect on stroke risk and vascular diseases. Past studies have linked sugar-sweetened beverage consumption with weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gout and coronary artery disease, but current research has implicated diet soft drink consumption with increased disease risk and weight gain due to depletion of essential minerals.
Lead study author Dr. Adam Bernstein noted “Soda remains the largest source of added sugar in the diet… what we’re beginning to understand is that regular intake of these beverages sets off a chain reaction in the body that can potentially lead to many diseases, including stroke.” Researchers analyzed soda consumption among 43,371 men and 84,085 women over a time span of nearly thirty years. During that time, 2,938 strokes were documented in women while 1,416 strokes were documented in men.
Carbonated beverage consumption associated with a 43 percent increased risk of heart attack
This study emphasizes the inherent risks involved with consumption of sugar-sweetened or no-calorie soft drinks. Sweetened drinks contain high levels of glucose that lead to a rapid increase in blood glucose and insulin. Over time, this results in glucose intolerance, insulin resistance and systemic inflammation. Low and no calorie carbonated beverages contain artificial sweeteners including aspartame, known to overstimulate and excite brain neurons resulting in cellular death.
Further, artificial sweeteners of all types trick our digestive chemistry and hormone balance, leading to weight gain and metabolic instability. Diet soft drinks have also been shown to leach calcium from bones as our body attempts to compensate for the high acidic load delivered from the phosphoric acid content in the drink. The end result is higher risk of osteoporosis, stroke and cardiovascular disease.
Despite the millions of dollars spent by soda marketers to instill the virtues of drinking soda, there is nothing healthy about consuming any type of carbonated beverage. Regarding low calorie drinks, researchers concluded “older adults who drank diet soda daily had a 43% increased risk of heart attack or stroke compared to those that never drank diet soda.” The study did note that drinking coffee was associated with a ten percent lower risk of stroke, compared to those drinking sweetened beverages. Substitute carbonated beverage consumption with an antioxidant packed cup of green tea or coffee to significantly reduce stroke and vascular disease risks
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This is a question on the pancreas and the question goes; can you please tell us how to heal the pancreas?
Now, there are many illnesses related to a dysfunctional or weak pancreas, for example diabetes, but something that is rarely considered is that it is to a large degree due to impaired liver and gall bladder function. What happens very often is that when the liver bile ducts get congested and the gallbladder fills up with stones, there are stones and bile sludge moving into the common bile duct and from there up into the pancreatic duct. And this can inhibit the pancreas, secretion of pancreatic juices, or pancreatic enzymes, and that can lead to these pancreatic enzymes to build up in the pancreas in an inactivated form. Typically, when the pancreatic duct is open, pancreatic enzymes move into the common bile duct where the pancreatic juices or enzymes combine with bile, and the bile is activating these digestive enzymes, so that when these two – the bile and the pancreatic enzymes – move into the small intestine, they can begin to digest the food that you have ingested.
Now when the pancreas or the pancreatic duct is congested with stones or sludge that has come from the bile ducts of the liver or from the gall bladder, then these inactivated enzymes would begin to destroy the pancreatic cells, particularly pancreatic islets and this can lead to the occurrence of insulin deficiency and also to diabetes and to progressive inflammation of the pancreas which is called pancreatitis.
So this destruction of the pancreas can be corrected or healed simply by making sure that the bile ducts in the liver and the gall bladder are clean, that they are cleaned out through a series of liver and gall bladder flushes so that in the future there is no clogging up of the pancreatic duct which can lead to the pancreatitis or slow unnoticeable or unnoticed destruction of the pancreas.
I definitely recommend liver and gall bladder flushes for any pancreas problems because there is just not much around to help the pancreas heal. And, if the pancreas is congested for a long time it leads to pancreatic cancer which is a little more difficult to treat than other kinds of cancers.
The other thing that with regards to the pancreas is very important is that we make changes to the diet and lifestyle because, the diet particularly has a great influence on the pancreas. For example, if a person drinks a lot of alcohol, we know that this can damage the pancreas again, beyond the liver and the other issue is eating lot of sugar, a lot of kids eat a lot of sugar, having soft drinks which can also destroy the pancreas. So it is important to consider a changing of the diet so that we do not create the same problem again and again.
Not just cleaning out the liver but also making the adjustments, setting the preconditions for the pancreas to heal itself.
I hope you find this helpful and wish you a wonderful and great day.
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Ways to Balance Blood Sugar and resolve Insulin Resistance
Hi this is a great question from Kenny Chan: What is the best way to balance blood sugar or resolve insulin resistance?
In order to answer that question, we have to identify the root causes for abnormal blood sugar level and not just rectify or attack the symptoms such as high blood sugar or the inability of these cells to take up insulin that carries sugar into the cells which is called insulin resistance.
So to look at what causes insulin resistance or high blood sugar, we should not just look at sugar consumption. Obviously, sugar consumption in excess can lead to such conditions but we should also look at other factors that are hardly ever mentioned or never mentioned by medical industry, that is, the consumption of animal proteins.
If you look at any book of physiology and anatomy you will find that insulin is heavily involved in the removal of amino acids or synthesis of amino acids that are produced when you digest foods that are basically protein foods so, when amino acids are made available to the body from the digestion of protein foods, your body needs insulin in order to accomplish the synthesis. The more proteins you consume, the more insulin you require. In fact if you eat a steak from a cow you require far-far more insulin than you would if you consumed twelve teaspoons of sugar. So there is just no comparison of anything that stimulates the body.
In addition to that we know that meat is a very powerful stimulant. You require insulin to meet that stimulation because stimulation means you require sugar in order to respond to any ‘fight or flight’ response in the body, for example, it requires a lot of sugar. Eating meat requires a strong immune response in the gut and that requires energy, to fulfill the needs for additional energy your body has to take the energy from any ingested food or from the blood stream and resupply that into the blood stream, and that requires a lot of insulin to deliver that extra sugar to the cells so that they can meet the demand that results from the stimulation.
So once again it is not such a clear cut thing; sugar increases blood sugar, the biggest cause of increased insulin resistance is meat consumption, animal protein consumption because of the high stimulation and because of the increased demand for insulin that will basically make the cells more and more sensitive to insulin. This is a protective effect, the diabetes is not a disease it is a protective mechanism that sets in when there is far too much insulin available.
Insulin can cause cancer, so if you produce too much of this hormone insulin, then this is a leading cause for self mutation and cancer growth. So you want to keep your insulin secretion at the level that the body can handle it, if you make too much insulin, the cells will try to shut the doors for that insulin to come in to deliver the sugar, and so the doors are closed and therefore the sugar is building up in the blood stream and that can be identified through tests that show that you have a higher blood sugar level than normal, so this is more or less a protective mechanism for the cells to avoid too much insulin exposure so these cells do not become cancerous, its side effect is that you have high blood sugar.
So when you take this, when you understand the mechanism, it makes it easier to deal with the root causes of the insulin resistance or diabetes, resulting diabetes, than just suppressing the symptom which is high blood sugar which can make matters actually worse. So that’s why you have such high complications when you take a drug that lowers the blood sugar; these drugs are very dangerous they can cause brain damage and heart disease and many other issues that are now well known because of scientific research that has been done on those drugs.
I recommend that you take recourse to natural ways of dealing with high blood sugar besides changing the diet, avoiding animal proteins and high sugar corn syrup or products, soft drinks, sweets, foods that are high in white flour, pastry, cookies and so on and use natural sweeteners you like, like honey or palm sugar or coconut sugar instead of regular sugar which does not cause these same sugar spikes. And to take recourse to exercise.
Exercise has been shown to be a very effective way in lowering the blood sugar far more effective than medication can be. And so when you exercise you actually require more sugar to leave the blood stream to get into the muscles, so your body will therefore lower the blood sugar quite naturally. Its similar effect is accomplished by exposing the body to the sun on a regular basis, sunbathing and even exercising in the sun, it has even a stronger effect in reducing or balancing the blood sugar levels.
There are many scientific research studies that is done on the effect of sunshine and the resulting vitamin D production in the body that in itself has an immune balancing effect and a blood sugar balancing effect, it also helps to strengthen the pancreas and the insulin producing capacity of the pancreatic cells. So there are natural things you can do through diet, lifestyle changes, sleep patterns, we now know that if you sleep between ten o’clock at night and six’ clock in the morning, get a good eight hour sleep, you will balance the blood sugar level quite naturally.
Going to bed late or after eleven, twelve, one clock and it will upset your blood sugar levels. There are things that are written in my book “TIMELESS SECRETS OF HEALTH AND REJUVENATION” about it, you can read up on it and it is basically self explanatory but, it is very important that we stop the epidemic, the epidemic of diabetes that is engulfing this country. It is not a disease, it is a metabolic disorder that is caused by lifestyle and dietary abnormalities that we have fallen into collectively, that we are no longer capable of living healthy lives. Anything that puts toxins in the body can affect the immune system and the blood regulating mechanisms of the liver.
I always recommend that anyone who has blood sugar issues to do the liver and gall bladder flushes, many people who do them find that automatically the body’s blood sugar mechanism, regulating mechanisms, become normalized indirectly. Just cleaning out the blood, making the liver more effective in dealing with proteins and sugars because basically all sugars have to be converted by the liver… if the liver is not capable of removing, or converting, glucose into complex sugar reserves in the body and storing them, then obviously, you will have too much sugar in the blood stream. So cleaning out the liver bile duct which enhances the liver’s ability to deal with the sugar properly without leaving a surplus of the sugar in the blood stream is very effective.
So sunshine, exercise, diet, lifestyle changes, sleeping at the regular normal hours of the night – all these are very powerful ways of making sure that the blood sugar is normal and you do not have insulin resistance.
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