Osteoporosis remains undiagnosed in millions of Americans; here’s how to beat the disease with nutrition, exercise and sunlight

Millions of Americans have osteoporosis but don’t know it, according to a new study authored by Stanford University School of Medicine. It says that 10 million Americans have osteoporosis right now, and 4 million more are at risk, but many people don’t notice that they have the condition until they receive a bone fracture — usually in the hip, the spine, or the wrist.
There’s a great deal of misinformation about osteoporosis in organized medicine. It’s a highly lucrative disease — more than 17 billion dollars were spent treating osteoporosis in 2001 alone, and I’m sure that number is much higher today. Osteoporosis sounds like a complex disease, but it really isn’t. In Western medicine, doctors and researchers like to make things sound far more complicated than they really are, which is why this disease has such a complex-sounding name. But osteoporosis should really be named “brittle bones disease.” It’s nothing more than brittle bones, or a loss of bone mass or bone density. There’s really nothing complicated about it.

The primary sources of this loss of bone mass are quiet simple — they are diet and physical exercise. And it’s not what you necessarily think about diet and physical exercise, so let’s take a look at this in detail, and I’m confident you will learn some new information here about osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis is really caused by only three things. They are: 1) diet, 2) physical exercise, and 3) lack of exposure to natural sunlight. It’s really not that complex, so let’s take a closer look at these three things, and explore their correlation with osteoporosis and loss of bone density.

First, we have diet. When it comes to diet and osteoporosis, most people think that a lack of calcium is the number one dietary concern. But this isn’t true — calcium is only a minor factor when it comes to preventing and treating osteoporosis. Certainly calcium supplements can help, especially if they provide calcium derived from plant sources, but they alone cannot reverse osteoporosis.

The primary dietary cause of osteoporosis is the consumption of highly acidic foods and food ingredients, such as refined white sugar, refined white flour, high-fructose corn syrup, soft drinks, cookies, candies, sweets, desserts, and anything containing sweeteners. Something rather destructive happens in your body when you consume acidic ingredients. Your blood must maintain a specific pH level in order to support human health. If your pH varies from a level of about 7.1, you start to suffer rather destructive side effects, and if it strays extremely far from 7.1, you will die within a matter of minutes. So the body does everything possible to make sure that your blood maintains a healthy pH level. When you consume highly acidic foods, your body has to come up with a strategy for buffering the acidity of those foods with alkaline minerals, and the way it does that is by reaching into your skeletal system to find those alkaline minerals such as calcium and magnesium, then releasing those into your bloodstream to buffer the acidity of the food ingredients you have absorbed. In this way, your body can balance the pH of its blood and keep you alive.
So every time you drink a soft drink, or drink a product containing corn syrup or sugar, you are effectively taking a few grams of bone density right out of your skeletal system. This gets passed through your kidneys, where it can also contribute to kidney stones, by the way, and then leaves your body in your urine. In a very real sense then, you are pissing away your bones when you consume refined sugars and refined white flour. Anything that’s highly acidic will cause this effect in your body.

This is the number one dietary cause of osteoporosis — not a lack of calcium. And for many women, especially older women, it comes in the form of the sugar in their morning cup of coffee. They start their day with a drink that depletes their bone mass. And then they continue on with the day engaging in other lifestyle habits that deplete their bones even further. A couple of calcium supplements cannot undo all this damage.
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 To prevent losing your bone mass to dietary causes, simply avoid consuming any white flour, processed sugars, added sugars, soft drinks, sweets, candies, breads, or any other ingredients that are made with refined carbohydrates. Essentially, if you follow the low-carb diet, you will be well on your way to avoiding refined carbohydrates — but beware — red meat is also highly acidic. In fact, meat products are acidic in nature and will contribute to the acidity of your diet. If you want to have an alkaline diet, you need to be eating superfoods like chlorella and spirulina. You need to eat fresh vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, onions, celery, and other green, leafy vegetables. You need to get plenty of calcium and magnesium from healthy sources such as organic, plant-based vitamins. You also need to supplement your diet with various sea vegetables, which are naturally alkaline. Those include seaweed, kelp, and many others. And one of my favorite foods for supporting an alkaline diet is, of course, sprouts. I love sunflower sprouts, broccoli sprouts, clover sprouts, and other varieties. These are all considered superfoods because they have extremely high nutrient density.
The second cause of osteoporosis, or loss of bone mass, is lack of physical activity, and to understand this, you have to look at the miracle of the human body and understand how the human body knows to build bone mass in the first place. Bones are piezo-electric devices. As such devices, they give off an electric current when they are physically stressed. In other words, if you take a bone, and put it on a lab table and apply pressure to it, it will actually produce an electric charge. In your body, this electric charge attracts a matrix of minerals to the location that’s being stressed where they add to the bone mass density and essentially build bigger and stronger bones.
 
In other words, by simply getting up and standing on your legs, you are telling your body you need to build stronger leg bones. If you walk on a regular basis, you’re telling your body you need stronger hips. And the more you engage in these frequent stresses of your bones, the stronger your bones get. Your body has a very strong adaptation response to the activities that you choose to pursue, and this is one of those adaptation responses. In my book, it’s a rather miraculous response because it allows the human body to adapt over time to almost any level of physical activity you choose to pursue.
Now, this is all basic stuff. This is really Anatomy and Physiology 101. These are the basics, right here, and yet I’m amazed at how many doctors neglect to tell their patients about the importance of physical exercise. Instead, they tend to treat osteoporosis with nothing but drugs. They imagine that osteoporosis is caused by a lack of prescription drugs, and therefore drugs are the only thing that can treat it. In fact, drugs are only marginally effective. The body has a much stronger, built-in system for reversing brittle bones disease, or osteoporosis if you want to call it that, and that mechanism is to simply stress your bones and then let your body build up higher bone density on its own. You don’t even have to think about it — all you have to do is stress your bones. Your body builds stronger bones automatically.

Now, to see some examples of why what I’m telling you is true, take a look at what happens to astronauts when they orbit the planet in zero gravity environments. The longer they stay in zero gravity, the more bone mass they start to lose. If they stay in zero gravity for several months, the bones literally become mushy (this is one of the major problems with long-term space travel). Their heads get spherical like a balloon and start to lose their earthly shape. When they eventually come back to earth, some astronauts can hardly walk at all — their bodies have lost the ability to support their own weight, and they have to undergo physical rehab (gravity training, basically) in the earth’s gravity in order for their body to readapt to an environment that has to support their body weight.
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 It can happen that fast, and if you sit on the couch most of the day, or lay in bed most of the day, and don’t expose your body to earth’s gravity by standing or walking, you are essentially giving yourself a sort of zero gravity treatment — you’re telling your body that you don’t need your bones, and therefore your body will get rid its “extra” bone mass. See, the body is a highly efficient machine. The body lets go of things that you don’t absolutely need. That’s because during human evolution, calories were scarce, and it didn’t make strategic sense for an organism to invest caloric energy in muscle mass or bone mass that wasn’t needed. That’s why if you stop working out you’ll lose muscle mass, and if you stop walking and stressing your bones, you will lose bone mass. Once again, this is really basic stuff — there’s nothing complex in this at all. Osteoporosis is simply a name given to a set of symptoms that will appear when a person stops exercising their body and stops stressing their bones. Physicians never describe it in these terms, of course. They want to make it sound complicated, technical, and out of your intellectual range. But if you can understand the effects of gravity and the acidity of unhealthful foods, you already know all you need to know about preventing osteoporosis.
With all of that in mind, it’s very easy to see how you can prevent and even reverse osteoporosis regardless of your current age. The first thing is, of course, to shift to a highly alkaline diet and avoid all acidic food and drinks. The second thing is to engage in regular physical exercise, such as walking, jogging, swimming, cycling and so on. Of course, you should always be working with a health professional before undergoing any new exercise program to make sure that you’re capable of handling it, but even if you can’t engage in something like jogging, there’s always something you can do — there’s some way you can move your body, even if it means sitting in a chair and pumping some dumbbells a few times a day.

In all of this, I must also stress the importance of undergoing strength training. Nothing increases your bone density like strength training. And I’m talking about going to the gym and pushing weights on weight machines. This will increase your bone mass density so rapidly that it will absolutely stun you and your doctors. No prescription drug can come close to duplicating the effectiveness of strength training on your bone mass.
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 See, when you lift your own body, you’re stressing your bones to a certain degree, and that’s helping build bone mass to a limit. But when you start adding weight to your body and lifting that as well as your body weight, you’re telling your body that you need even more density in your bones. So, if you put 100 pounds on your shoulders and squat that weight using your leg muscles and your pelvis for support, you are essentially telling your body that you need stronger leg muscles and a stronger skeletal system to support that weight. This gives you a higher degree of adaptive response than you could possibly achieve from lifting only your body weight. So strength training is absolutely essential, especially for elderly people who wish to prevent or reverse osteoporosis, and yet it is precisely elderly people who tend to avoid strength training because they carry the misconception that it’s an activity for young people only. But in reality, it is older people who need it far more than younger people.
Moving onto the third part of osteoporosis, let’s talk about natural sunlight. When you don’t get natural sunlight, your body thinks that you’re in hibernation, in a sense. And a lot of things start to go wrong with your body and your mind when you lack natural sunlight on your skin. Osteoporosis is one of those things. That’s because when you expose your skin to sunlight, your body automatically generates vitamin D, and vitamin D is essential for using calcium to build increased bone mass. Without vitamin D in your body, your body cannot use the calcium that you’re eating in your diet. So you could be eating all the calcium in the world, and you could be exercising every day, but if you’re not getting sunlight on your skin, and you’re not getting vitamin D into your body, and you don’t have the fundamental building blocks that your body needs to add to its own bone mass. This will inevitably result in a great loss of bone mass or an inability to add any new bone mass.

Natural sunlight is absolutely essential to this process. You have to get it on your skin, on a frequent basis, without sunscreen. The next best thing if you can’t get natural sunlight is to take vitamin D supplements such as cod liver oil. You can also get vitamin D in other forms, but cod liver oil is the best form available. You can find it any health food store. But remember you can make vitamin D yourself simply by getting some sunlight on your skin (your body is a living, breathing vitamin D factory…).
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 How much sunlight do you need? I say 30 minutes a day, but it depends on where you live on the planet. The closer you are to the equator, the less time you need in the sun. But the darker your skin, the more time you need, so a person who lives close to the equator but has dark skin pigmentation needs far more sunlight exposure than, say, a person living close to the equator with pale skin. At the same time, a person with dark skin living in northern climates, such as Canada or the UK, needs a very large amount of time in the sun in order to maintain optimum health.
That’s because people with dark sun pigmentation did not evolve in such northern climates. They actually evolved in more equatorial regions where sunlight was far more intense. It’s also important to note that you should avoid using sunscreens during the time that you’re attempting to get sunlight nutrition. That’s because sunscreen will block the sun from being absorbed by your skin, and of course it’s pointless to pursue nutrition from the sun if you’re using sunscreen to block it in the first place. You have to get natural sunlight on your skin without any interference.

Of course, use common sense here. If you’re pale and not used to getting sun on your skin, you may be easily burned at first. So watch your time in the sun, especially when you’re not using sunscreen. Over time, of course, your skin will adapt and you will be able to handle far longer times in the sun.

The bottom line is that if you put all these three together — diet, physical exercise, and exposure to natural sunlight — you can quite easily prevent and even reverse osteoporosis. This is a very simple disease. It has a few simple causes, and it’s incredibly easy to reverse. You do not need prescription drugs to treat this disease. You do not need surgical procedures or other radical medical therapies. Osteoporosis is a natural result of poor dietary and lifestyle habits, and it can be easily reversed in a matter of months by changing what you do on a daily basis.

The fact that it goes undiagnosed in so many millions of Americans simply speaks to the fact that American society is an extremely unhealthful society that consumes vast quantities of sugars and processed foods, avoids physical exercise, and flees from the sunlight as if were some kind of raging demon in the sky. But you, I think, know better, and now you know how to prevent and reverse osteoporosis without using prescription drugs, no matter what your age.

Milk and dairy products cause heart disease, diabetes and osteoporosis — interview with Robert Cohen

Mike Adams: What is it that drove you to have this kind of interest and energy to pursue the truth about milk and dairy products?

Robert Cohen: Three little girls named Jennifer, Sarah, and Lizzie — my daughters. I wanted them to have healthy bodies. I wanted them not to live four years of high school life with zits all over their body like their dad did. And you know something? They’ve been zit free! No acne, and if you look at my book, Milk A to Z, I take every letter of the alphabet and fill in something about milk. Z is for zits, and we know that these cows are actually being milked before they give birth, and that milk is different milk — it’s milk instructing mammary tissue to grow. Little girls have changed these days, but we find that with the secretion of all of these androgens, the cows are constantly using the androgens to produce other hormones. Teenage acne is improved the second we give up milk. It takes a couple of weeks, and the acne’s gone. And these androgens stimulate the sebaceous glands, which are the glands that cause the acne, cause the zits.

So we find a dairy link to a number of human conditions. And I’m not the first to say this — Dr. Spock said this. Dr. Spock sold 75 million copies of his book on child care. The only book that sold more than Dr. Spock’s book in history is the Bible. Dr. Spock said that no human, no child, no adult needs cow’s milk — it’s a deception on the government’s part to promote. And we’re learning, as I’ve said, more doctors are learning today something they were not taught in medical school. You want to look at the etiology of allergies and diabetes? You look at diabetes, you look at the New England Journal of Medicine, July 31, 1992 — right there, you can look it up! It said that exposure to these bovine proteins, bovine serum lactobumin is a trigger for insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, and a few months later, October of ‘92, Scientific America talked about the dairy slogan,”Milk, it does a body good.” It said, “Milk, it does a body good — it sounds a little hollow these days.”

Mike Adams: Can you give a brief summary of — you’ve mentioned a few here, diabetes and acne, heart disease is mentioned in your book quite prominently — but what other chronic diseases are, say, aggravated or even caused by chronic milk consumption?
Robert Cohen: Well, you know, that’s an interesting question. Let’s look at the Big Five — in America, the number one killer is heart disease, and then we’ve got osteoporosis and cancer, and diabetes and asthma. We look at nations where they drink milk, we find these diseases are common. We look at nations where cheese consumption has tripled in the last 30 years, like England and France and Canada and the United States, we find also a tripling of asthma and breast cancers. Guess what country has the highest rate of breast cancer? Number one in breast cancer rate, Denmark, followed by Norway, followed by Holland, followed by Sweden — are you detecting a trend?

Mike: Milk consumption.

Robert Cohen: Let’s play some more trivia with you, Mike. We know breast cancer — what country has the highest rate of heart disease?

Mike Adams: Well, I’m still thinking the United States.

Robert Cohen: Nope! Denmark, Norway, Holland and Sweden — you’re going to get it sooner or later! Bone disease, heart disease, breast cancer — see where are we going with this? –highest rates of dairy consumption. We’re seeing absolute correlations between these diseases and dairy consumption, and I can give you the reason. We have much more than just national epidemiological studies — we have mechanisms by which these diseases occur, in breast cancer and every cancer, thousands of things cause cancer. Every time we pick up a newspaper there’s a new thing identified as causing cancer.

But thousands of things cause it — once you get it in your body, one thing makes it grow, and the one thing that makes it grow is the most powerful growth hormone you make in your body called insulin growth factor. And remarkably, the greatest miracle of science, of nature, is that this hormone in a cow’s body and in a human body is identical. As a matter of fact, out of 4700 different species of mammal and hundreds of millions of different proteins in nature, there’s only one hormone in the entire animal kingdom that is identical between two species — human and cow IGF-1, which has been called the key factor in the growth and proliferation of breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, every human cancer.
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 Mike Adams: Now of course, the dairy industry says that all of these hormones are destroyed through pasteurization and they don’t get absorbed by humans who consume their products. We know that’s not true, but why is that?
Robert Cohen: Let’s analyze that statement, because maybe they’re right, and if they’re right, that means breastfeeding doesn’t work. So if you’re thinking that breastfeeding doesn’t work, then go ahead and drink your cow’s milk, but if by some remote chance you’re thinking, Well, maybe breastfeeding does work, well by drinking the cow’s milk you’re breastfeeding, and you’re taking the hormones, and in a very efficient way, more efficient than even nature, because nature finds a way to make lots of something. Like, if you look at fish, at codfish — they’re laying tens of thousands of eggs. Some species of fish lay over half a million eggs, because the fish, somehow there’s some innate knowledge that has determined that most of those eggs are going to be eaten by predators. Most of those eggs will not survive to become new baby fish.

Well, the body works the same way — you make millions and millions of sperm. You make millions and millions of cells. You make enough so that something survives. And in the case of this hormone, IGF-1, your body is constantly making it, and it’s broken down very rapidly, or bound to other protein receptors. But in the case of cow’s milk, we’ve improved upon nature — we have cow’s milk where normally these proteins are gone very rapidly. We homogenize milk - in other words, we take the milk and make the fat molecules between 10 and 100 times smaller. We make many more of them — a pint of milk can contain a trillion tiny fat molecules. They envelop and protect these hormones, which naturally, most of them are destroyed. So now we have a mechanism by which we double the amount of this powerful growth hormone in your body, and where it usually is broken down in less than a second or two, it now remains active for up to 30 minutes. When it finds an existing cancer, which is also common, that is the turn-on mechanism. And that’s why the nations that are drinking the most milk today and eating the most cheese are the ones with the highest rates of every human cancer.
 

Calcium supplements all but useless without adequate vitamin D from sunlight exposure: interview with Dr. Michael Holick, author of The UV Advantage

The following is part seven of an eight-part interview with Dr. Michael Holick, author of “The UV advantage” and one of the world’s most respected authorities on vitamin D and the health benefits of natural sunlight. His work can be found at www.UVadvantage.com. Be sure to print out the vitamin D myths, facts and statistics page summarizing the key points of this interview.
Adams: In your book you talk about the link with calcium and calcium assimilation. How important is that for people to understand?

Dr. Holick: Well, it’s critically important for people to realize that even if they have an adequate amount of vitamin D, if they don’t have any calcium around, the vitamin D can’t have the desired effect on bone health without being able to get enough calcium out of the diet and to put it into the bloodstream which will eventually get to your bones. So, making sure that you have adequate calcium intake is very important. And the recommendation by the Institute of Medicine (and I was on this committee back in 1997) is that if you’re a teenager, 1300mg a day of calcium, for adults ages 18-50 it’s 1000mg of calcium and 51+ years it’s 1200mgs of calcium for both men and women.

Adams: And you mention that you have to have calcium in your system for vitamin D to work - is the opposite also true? You’ve got to have vitamin D for the calcium to be effective?

Dr. Holick: Oh, no question about it. If you are deficient in vitamin D, you absorb on average 10-15% of the calcium that’s in your diet. If you’re sufficient in vitamin D, if you have adequate sun exposure or adequate intake of vitamin D, you absorb about 30% of the calcium in your diet. During pregnancy and lactation, and during growth spurts, the body responds appropriately by actually increasing that efficiency up to 80%.

Adams: So the normal level is 30%.

Dr. Holick: 30% for healthy adults, yes.

Adams: So a person who’s taking, let’s say coral calcium supplements, if they’re not getting sunshine or vitamin D to go with it, their absorption is halved.

Dr. Holick: Yeah, exactly, and it’s really of little benefit.
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 Adams: That’s fascinating. Once again showing that there’s no single magic pill, you have to be healthy across the board.
Dr. Holick: That’s right. And what I typically recommend to my patients is Tums or Os-Cal or Caltrate or any of the respected brands … Super Cal or all good sources of calcium.

Adams: As long as you’ve got vitamin D.

Dr. Holick: Correct. If you have adequate vitamin D or some sun exposure.

Adams: Cod liver oil is of course a great source of vitamin D, as you mention, but some people are concerned about contamination of these oily fish with heavy metals - is that a concern?

Dr. Holick: Yes, PCBs. And so, what you have to do is if you’re going to buy it, buy it from a respectable source. Certainly it’s a step in the right direction. But you know there are omega fatty acids in there that have benefits to the heart, and have other health benefits. So it may be that many of those outweigh the possible risk if there are contaminants in there. Although, like I said, a lot of the manufacturers are pretty good at making sure that there aren’t.
 

Vitamin D myths, facts and statistics

Vitamin D prevents osteoporosis, depression, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and even effects diabetes and obesity. Vitamin D is perhaps the single most underrated nutrient in the world of nutrition. That’s probably because it’s free: your body makes it when sunlight touches your skin. Drug companies can’t sell you sunlight, so there’s no promotion of its health benefits. Truth is, most people don’t know the real story on vitamin D and health. So here’s an overview taken from an interview between Mike Adams and Dr. Michael Holick.

Vitamin D is produced by your skin in response to exposure to ultraviolet radiation from natural sunlight.
The healing rays of natural sunlight (that generate vitamin D in your skin) cannot penetrate glass. So you don’t generate vitamin D when sitting in your car or home.
It is nearly impossible to get adequate amounts of vitamin D from your diet. Sunlight exposure is the only reliable way to generate vitamin D in your own body.
A person would have to drink ten tall glasses of vitamin D fortified milk each day just to get minimum levels of vitamin D into their diet.
The further you live from the equator, the longer exposure you need to the sun in order to generate vitamin D. Canada, the UK and most U.S. states are far from the equator.
People with dark skin pigmentation may need 20 - 30 times as much exposure to sunlight as fair-skinned people to generate the same amount of vitamin D. That’s why prostate cancer is epidemic among black men — it’s a simple, but widespread, sunlight deficiency.
Sufficient levels of vitamin D are crucial for calcium absorption in your intestines. Without sufficient vitamin D, your body cannot absorb calcium, rendering calcium supplements useless.
Chronic vitamin D deficiency cannot be reversed overnight: it takes months of vitamin D supplementation and sunlight exposure to rebuild the body’s bones and nervous system.
Even weak sunscreens (SPF=8) block your body’s ability to generate vitamin D by 95%. This is how sunscreen products actually cause disease — by creating a critical vitamin deficiency in the body.
It is impossible to generate too much vitamin D in your body from sunlight exposure: your body will self-regulate and only generate what it needs.
If it hurts to press firmly on your sternum, you may be suffering from chronic vitamin D deficiency right now.
Vitamin D is “activated” in your body by your kidneys and liver before it can be used.
Having kidney disease or liver damage can greatly impair your body’s ability to activate circulating vitamin D.
The sunscreen industry doesn’t want you to know that your body actually needs sunlight exposure because that realization would mean lower sales of sunscreen products.
Even though vitamin D is one of the most powerful healing chemicals in your body, your body makes it absolutely free. No prescription required.

On the issue of sunlight exposure, by the way, it turns out that super antioxidants greatly boost your body’s ability to handle sunlight without burning. Astaxanthin is one of the most powerful “internal sunscreens” and can allow you to stay under the sun twice as long without burning. Other powerful antioxidants with this ability include the superfruits like Acai, Pomegranates (POM Wonderful juice), blueberries, etc.

Diseases and conditions cause by vitamin D deficiency:
Osteoporosis is commonly caused by a lack of vitamin D, which greatly impairs calcium absorption.
Sufficient vitamin D prevents prostate cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, depression, colon cancer and schizophrenia.
“Rickets” is the name of a bone-wasting disease caused by vitamin D deficiency.
Vitamin D deficiency may exacerbate type 2 diabetes and impair insulin production in the pancreas.
Obesity impairs vitamin D utilization in the body, meaning obese people need twice as much vitamin D.
Vitamin D is used around the world to treat Psoriasis.
Vitamin D deficiency causes schizophrenia.
Seasonal Affective Disorder is caused by a melatonin imbalance initiated by lack of exposure to sunlight.
Chronic vitamin D deficiency is often misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia because its symptoms are so similar: muscle weakness, aches and pains.
Your risk of developing serious diseases like diabetes and cancer is reduced 50% - 80% through simple, sensible exposure to natural sunlight 2-3 times each week.
Infants who receive vitamin D supplementation (2000 units daily) have an 80% reduced risk of developing type 1 diabetes over the next twenty years.
Shocking Vitamin D deficiency statistics:
32% of doctors and med school students are vitamin D deficient.
40% of the U.S. population is vitamin D deficient.
42% of African American women of childbearing age are deficient in vitamin D.
48% of young girls (9-11 years old) are vitamin D deficient.
Up to 60% of all hospital patients are vitamin D deficient.
76% of pregnant mothers are severely vitamin D deficient, causing widespread vitamin D deficiencies in their unborn children, which predisposes them to type 1 diabetes, arthritis, multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia later in life. 81% of the children born to these mothers were deficient.
Up to 80% of nursing home patients are vitamin D deficient.

What you can do:
Sensible exposure to natural sunlight is the simplest, easiest and yet one of the most important strategies for improving your health. I urge you to read the book, “The UV Advantage” by Dr. Michael Holick to get the full story on natural sunlight. You can find this book at most local bookstores or through BN.com, Amazon.com, etc. Note: This is not a paid endorsement or an affiliate link. I recommend it because of its great importance in preventing chronic disease and enhancing health without drugs or surgery. This may be the single most important book on health you ever read. If more people understood this information, we could drastically reduce the rates of chronic disease in this country and around the world. Sunlight exposure is truly one of the most powerful healing therapies in the world, far surpassing the best efforts of today’s so-called “advanced medicine.” There is no drug, no surgical procedure, and no high-tech procedure that comes even close to the astonishing healing power of natural sunlight.

Vitamin D boosts calcium absorption, treats psoriasis, prevents osteoporosis and breast cancer interview with Dr. Michael Holick

The following is part one of an eight-part interview with Dr. Michael Holick, author of “The UV advantage” and one of the world’s most respected authorities on vitamin D and the health benefits of natural sunlight. His work can be found at www.UVadvantage.com. Be sure to print out the vitamin D myths, facts and statistics page summarizing the key points of this interview.

Adams: Today we’re speaking with Dr Michael Holick, Thank you for joining us today Dr Holick.

Dr. Holick: Oh, it’s my pleasure.

Adams: For those who may not be familiar with your work and your website, can you give a brief introduction of what you cover and how you got into it?

Dr. Holick: Sure, I’ve been doing research in the vitamin D field for, now, more than 30 years, and I happened to be in the right place at the right time as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and worked with one of the authorities in vitamin D, Dr. Hector DeLuca. As a graduate student my PhD project was actually the isolation and identification of the active form of vitamin D, and my roommate and I, over the next two years, were the first to chemically synthesize it. And what was really neat about that experience was that we actually gave this to patients when I was in medical school — and patients that had bone diseases associated with kidney failure, that were wheelchair bound, that had severe bone pain started walking again.

That was my first introduction into one of the major benefits of activated vitamin D and the development of it for the treatment of a bone disease.

Adams: Does this mean you and your colleague were the first to synthesize this form of vitamin D?

Dr. Holick: Yes, the active form of vitamin D that’s made by the kidney, it’s called 125-dihydroxy vitamin D.

Adams: Is this procedure more widely used now, for example to make vitamin D supplements?

Dr. Holick: No, because this active form of vitamin D is available only by prescription. It’s used to treat osteoporosis in Europe and Japan. And it’s also used to treat bone disease and kidney failure patients, and has a lot of other uses as well.

Adams: So as you were doing the research on this, you were able to immediately observe the health impact of it, right away.

Dr. Holick: Exactly, and what we began to realize was that vitamin D was much more complex than thought. We always knew that vitamin D was made in your skin when you are exposed to sunlight, but it was only in the 1970s that it was finally appreciated that it actually had to go on this circuitous journey, first to your liver to get hydroxylated, kind of activated, modified — what’s called 25-hydroxy vitamin D - it’s the major circulating form of vitamin D that doctors should be measuring in your blood to determine your vitamin D status. But that is also inactive, and it has to go to your kidneys, and then in the kidneys it gets modified again, to its active form, which we call 125-dihydroxy vitamin D. And it’s this 125-dihydroxy vitamin D that’s responsible for telling your intestines to absorb calcium from your diet more efficiently, and to make sure that your blood calcium is normal and that you have healthy bones.

Adams: So if there is a failure of any of these body systems along the chain, that can suppress the circulating active vitamin D then?

Dr. Holick: Exactly, and in fact if you have severe liver disease, for example, you have two problems. One is that you may not be able to modify it, to get the 25-hydroxy vitamin D, and secondly if you have a fat malabsorption problem where you can’t absorb dietary fat, since vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, then you can’t absorb vitamin D and you become deficient in vitamin D. Then if you have any kind of kidney disease, you need either activated vitamin D or one its analogs in order to be able to maintain healthy bones.

Adams: In the testing then that you mentioned, was this active form being given through injection?

Dr. Holick: You could either take it orally or by injections.

Adams: Interesting. So you mentioned the positive impact on people who had trouble walking, who had osteoporosis, and various bone diseases. What other effects did you observe?
Related article
Sunlight emerging as proven treatment for breast cancer, prostate cancer and other cancers
Dr. Holick: We also realized a few years later was that your skin doesn’t only make vitamin D, which I think we’ll talk about a little bit more in a minute, but it also recognizes activated vitamin D. And what was really, to me, quite amazing, was that in 1985 we realized the possibility that if you take activated vitamin D and put it in skin cells that you culture from humans, it turns out that activated vitamin D was probably one of the most potent inhibitors of skin cell growth. So I reasoned back in 1985 that if that was true, maybe you could take advantage of it by developing it to treat the hyperproliferative skin disorder psoriasis. And indeed it’s one of the treatments of choice now worldwide. Both activated vitamin D and its analogs are used worldwide as the first line therapy for treating psoriasis.

And so again it shows you the breadth of activity that vitamin D has. Not only just to regulate calcium metabolism and bone health, but to regulate cell growth. And that’s why we started realizing that people who live in higher latitudes and are more prone to vitamin D deficiency and are more prone to developing common cancers and dying of them, such as cancer of the colon, prostate, breast and even ovaries. And we think that that’s in part due to the body’s inability to make enough activated vitamin D to help regulate cell growth and to keep cell growth in check.

Adams: That would explain the links between breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer and vitamin D deficiency.

Dr. Holick: Exactly. And then the key factor that we found was that, as I mentioned to you originally, we realized that the kidney was the major source of the activation of vitamin D. And the function of that is to make activated vitamin D for bone health. But we now also know that the prostate, breast, colon and many other tissues in the body can also activate vitamin D. And by doing so, we think that it locally produces this 125-dihydroxy vitamin D, which then regulates cell growth. It’s a cell growth modulator.

The health effects of drinking soda quotes from the experts

This is a compilation of quotes about the destructive health effects of soft drinks from some of the leading authors on health, nutrition and junk food. This full list, and much more information, is included in The Five Soft Drink Monsters downloadable ebook.

Michael Murray ND and Joseph Pizzorno ND
Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, Revised Second Edition

“The allergenicity of penicillin in the general population is thought to be at least ten percent. Nearly 25 percent of these individuals will display hives, angioedema, or anaphylaxis upon ingestion of penicillin…. hives and anaphylactic symptoms have been traced to penicillin in milk, soft drinks, and frozen dinners.”

“Many general dietary factors have been suggested as a cause of osteoporosis, including: low calcium-high phosphorus intake, high-protein diet, high-acid-ash diet, high salt intake, and trace mineral deficiencies. It appears that increased soft drink consumption is a major factor that contributes to osteoporosis. A deficiency of vitamin K leads to impaired mineralization of bone. Boron deficiency may contribute greatly to osteoporosis as well as to menopausal symptoms.”

“Soft drinks have long been suspected of leading to lower calcium levels and higher phosphate levels in the blood. When phosphate levels are high and calcium levels are low, calcium is pulled out of the bones. The phosphate content of soft drinks like Coca -Cola and Pepsi is very high, and they contain virtually no calcium.”

“The United States ranks first among countries in soft drink consumption. The per-capita consumption of soft drinks is in excess of 150 quarts per year, or about three quarts per week.”

“Soft drink consumption in children poses a significant risk factor for impaired calcification of growing bones.”

“Of the fifty-seven children who had low blood calcium levels, thirty-eight (66.7 percent) drank more than four bottles (12 to 16 ounces per bottle) of soft drinks per week, but only forty-eight (28 percent) of the 171 children with normal serum calcium levels consumed as much soft drink … These results more than support the contention that soft drink consumption leads to lower calcium levels in children. This situation that ultimately leads to poor bone mineralization, which explains the greater risk of broken bones in children who consume soft drinks.”

“Soft drink consumption may be a major factor for osteoporosis as they are high in phosphates but contain virtually no calcium. This leads to lower calcium levels and higher phosphate levels in the blood. The United States ranks first among countries for soft drink consumption with a per capita consumption of approximately 15 ounces a day.”

James A Howenstine M.D.
A Physician’s Guide to Natural Health Products That Work

“In an interesting experiment the sugar from one soft drink was able to damage the white blood cells’ ability to ingest and kill gonococcal bacteria for seven hours.”

“Soft drinks also contain large quantities of phosphorus, which when excreted pulls calcium out of the bones. Heavy users of soft drinks will have osteoporosis along with their damaged arteries.”

The unauthorized history of Coca-Cola (satire)

Coca-cola was originally promoted as a drink “offering the virtues of coca without the vices of alcohol.” Until 1903, a typical serving contained 60mg of cocaine. Today, it still contains an extract of coca leaves. The Coca-Cola Company imports eight tons of coca leaf from South America each year — a substance that, if carried into the country by any regular citizen, would result in their arrest and incarceration for “drug trafficking…”

It’s no coincidence that the name “Coca-Cola” starts with the name of the leaf used to manufacture cocaine: the coca leaf. From the late 1800’s, Coca-Cola contained varying amounts of cocaine (about 60mg of cocaine per serving in 1900) all the way up until 1929, when cocaine was finally removed from its formula. That was when all the doctors and dentists who were prescribing coke to their patients said, in unison, “Guess we’ll have to start actually addressing their medical problems instead of sending them home with more cocaine.” Simultaneously, Coca-Cola executives probably said, “Guess we’ll have to find another ingredient that’s highly addictive.” Hence, caffeine. But that’s not until later in this story.

The “Cola” part of the name comes from the “kola” nut — a nut containing yet an addictive chemical: caffeine. Combine caffeine and cocaine and, not surprisingly, you get a powerful drink called “Coca-Cola” that benefited strongly (from a marketing point of view) from the addictive traits of the narcotic / caffeine combination. It’s “The Real Thing,” all right, real substance addiction! Hard drugs and Starbucks, all in the same cup!

Not surprisingly, the Coca-Cola company claimed all sorts of health benefits for their product. Coca-cola was introduced in 1886 as “a valuable brain-tonic and cure for all nervous afflictions.” Its slogan in 1900 was, “For headache and exhaustion, drink Coca-Cola,” a slogan that now seems ridiculous for a beverage perhaps known best for its ability to cause obesity. A 1904 Coca-Cola slogan claims, “Coca-Cola is a delightful, palatable, healthful beverage,” and even in recent years, Coca-Cola has called its product “a wholesome beverage.” In my view, this is sort of like your neighborhood crack dealer saying, “Yep, this here crack will cure that cancer in no time!” Of course, Coke finally took the coke out of their formula, but they’re still using coca leaves.
Still Using Coca Leaves

If you hike a bag of coca leaves through U.S. customs on your way home from, say, Peru, you might be arrested for the federal crime of drug trafficking. Coca-Cola, however, imports nearly eight tons of coca leaves from South America each year (source: Cocaine.org, which appears to be an authority on coca leaves, imagine that…), and still uses those leaves in preparing its soft drinks. The cocaine is, reportedly, removed from the leaves before the leaves are used in the coca-cola manufacturing process. I’m just wondering where all that cocaine really goes. Do they destroy it? Do they sell it out the back door? Does the cocaine go back to Peru? I actually emailed Coca-Cola and asked them this every question. So far, I’ve received no response other than, “Hold on, we’ll reply as soon as we’re done snorting…” and I have no idea what that means.

Anyone who has actually been to Peru, by the way, knows that coca leaves are frequently chewed by Peruvian natives (and the ancient Incas, of course) to aid in altitude sickness and enhance stamina. It’s what helps a 110-pound Peruvian male wearing leather sandals sprint up a 14,000 foot mountain carrying the 80-pound pack. I know this because I hired the guy to carry my pack. Within seconds, he had sprinted up the mountain with all of my belongings and was out of sight. Hmmm…

But getting back to coca leaves, when they are chewed in their natural form, coca leaves hardly present a drug addiction problem, it’s only when they’re refined that they become hard drugs. As an occasional medicinal herb, the coca leaf actually does have health-enhancing characteristics, but it seems likely that Coca-Cola was a lot more interested in its profit characteristics than its health characteristics.

As an example of just how important profits are to Coca-Cola, take a look at the company’s effort to wipe out competing beverages… like water!

Coca-Cola Declares War on Water

Your body needs water, and lots of it! But if you’re drinking water, according to the way Coca-Cola once thought, you’re not drinking a Coke, and that’s bad for business. The solution? Declare war on water.

August, 2001: Coca-Cola announces the launch of an assault against tap water in restaurants, code-named “H2No.” (No, I’m not making this up…) They begin with the Olive Garden restaurants, describing customers’ ordering of water as a kind of affliction. From their own site, “Olive Garden restaurants… were facing a high water incidence rate.” (emphasis added).

A “high water incidence rate?” Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Sounds like an insidious anthrax attack. To combat this threat, they came up with their “water reduction plan.” This plan involved the re-education of waiters to suggest a “profitable beverage” in place of water. Olive Garden restaurants, according to the Coke site, liked the program so much that they incorporated it into their monthly skills training exercises. “Here’s a new skill, folks, we’re going to force all our customer to order a coke before they die of thirst…”

Believe it or not, they even developed an employee incentive contest, based on how much Coke the restaurant servers could get customers to drink. The program was called, “Just Say No to H2O” and it’s sort of like a college frat game where you see how much beer you can get the new pledges to drink in one night, without actually killing them. (Because if they’re dead, you can’t force them to clean up the frat house the next morning…)

If it sounds like madness, you’re right! Giving consumers a choice of drinks is considered polite; declaring war on water is something altogether different. The slogans chosen by Coca-Cola weren’t pro-Coke, they were anti-water. “Just Say No to H2O” sounds sort of like the cry of a political rally. Just imagine a herd of overweight Coca-cola executives marching around outside Olive Garden restaurants, holding up signs and declaring that water is actually BAD for you.

As waiters were selling more Coke to customers, profits were flowing into the restaurants — and into Coca-Cola’s coffers — but what about the health cost of drinking soft drinks? It is well known that consumption of soft drinks is a strong contributing factor in obesity — a condition that, according to former Surgeon General David Satcher, causes 300,000 deaths each year and $117 billion in unnecessary health bills from diseases like diabetes and clogged arteries. Heck, that’s almost as much as Coca-cola spends on advertising and celebrity endorsements! “Hi, I’m a well known sports celebrity with the brain of a naked mole rat. And I drink Coke!”

Today, there’s really no question that soft drink consumption directly promotes a variety of chronic diseases. For starters, here’s evidence of how soft drink consumption multiplies a person’s risk of diabetes. (See http://www.newstarget.com/001614.html for a summary.)

And just this year, new research was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition linking the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup (the primary sweetener in soft drinks) with both diabetes and obesity: http://www.newstarget.com/001054.html

Clearly, soft drinks are a hazard to the health of any individual (intelligent or otherwise) who chooses to consume them. Some of the other health effects now being attributed to soft drinks include loss of bone density, blood acidosis, kidney stress, immune system suppression, ADHD and even dramatic mood swings — these are the claims by well-known health and nutrition authors, including many prominent MDs.

As the profits flow into Coca-Cola, who pays the cost for the health effects caused by Coca-Cola products? You guessed it: you do. The consumer foots the bill not only for the product, but also for the doctor, hospital and insurance costs that inevitably appear as a result of consuming this health-harming beverage. I’m just guessing, but for every dollar a person spends on soft drinks, there might be as much as $4 - $5 in long-term costs to society.

Not surprisingly, Coca-Cola’s “H2No” web pages didn’t stay on their site for very long. They were taken down on August 2, 2001 and haven’t re-appeared since. Apparently, they no longer want to be known as the “anti-water” company. Because that would be, well, stupid. More importantly, it would go against their brand spankin’ new product offering — get this — water!

Enter Coca-Cola’s Water Product: Dasani

Coca-Cola apparently realized they couldn’t prevent the entire world from drinking water, even by brainwashing Olive Garden waiters, and the next best thing to declaring war on water is, of course, making money from it. Enter Coca-Cola’s water product, “Dasani,” now sold everywhere. Don’t confuse Dasani with spring water. It’s just plain old tap water (that starts out with all the same contaminants you get out of your kitchen faucet), but filtered and “enhanced” with some minerals.

Once Coca-Cola had a profitable water product in the mix, their message about water was magically transformed into something a lot more pro-water. Hooking up with Ideas.com, Coca-Cola solicited water product branding ideas from consumers, promising a $5,000 award to the best idea submitted. Their idea solicitation text read, “Many doctors have suggested that people should drink eight glasses of water a day. What ideas can you think of, that would make it easier for people to drink more water?”

Where was the “many doctors” attitude when Coca-Cola was pushing the H2No program? Naturally, it was nowhere to be found. There were profits to be had, after all! It’s amazing how Coca-cola seems to be able to find doctors to make sweeping statements that support whatever product is being pushed at the time, even if those statements contradict the company’s former position on the subject… heck, I bet Coke could even find a doctor that would testify before Congress that, “caffeine is not addictive!”

Twisting the truth for profit

As you can see from the information presented here so far, Coca-Cola appears to have a fascinating tendency to twist reality into whatever distortion supports higher corporate profits. Perhaps the most wildly humorous example of this reality twisting comes from Coca-Cola’s website right now. If you visit http://www2.coca-cola.com/contactus/myths_rumors/ingredients_addictive.html you’ll find this astounding statement, which could only have been authored by an individual who was smoking crack (hey, maybe that’s where all the cocaine goes. They’re feeding it to their webmasters!):

Junk science negative study on calcium and vitamin D supplements was poorly constructed, yet widely reported

Based on a new research study published in The Lancet (April, 2005), newspaper headlines around the world are proclaiming that senior citizens should throw away their calcium supplements and turn to prescription drugs as their primary treatment for osteoporosis and bone fractures. Gee, what a convenient message for Big Pharma. It’s not like we haven’t heard this before: remember the recent effort to try to convince people that vitamin E would kill them?

Of course, thanks to direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, Big Pharma practically owns the mainstream media these days. Stories that discredit vitamins and recommend expensive prescription drugs are met with the big “thumbs up” from influential advertisers like drug companies. That must be why journalists around the world leaped on this story and started parroting distorted conclusion (throw away your calcium supplements!) without actually bothering to read the study.

In fact, in looking at ten different articles in the mainstream press, I didn’t find a single article that actually mentioned the dosage of calcium of vitamin D that was given to patients. I only found two stories that mentioned the very low compliance rate of study participants. About half the people didn’t even take their supplements! Didn’t these journalists ever think that these details might matter?

But here’s the really interesting part: when you look at this study closely, the whole thing falls apart. Here’s why:

* Anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the patients failed to take their supplements

This indicates very low compliance with the study. And since 1/3 of the study participants self-reported failing to take the supplements, it is almost certain that more than 1/3 actually failed to take the supplements since people always tend to over-report their compliance. So we may have a study where 50% or more of the “participants” didn’t actually participate. At that level of non-compliance, you can hardly call them study “participants.”

* Levels of vitamin D before the study were not measured

If this study is supposed to look at the effects of calcium and vitamin D, then why wasn’t the vitamin D level of participants measured before the study began? Was this study conducted in Northern states, or Southern states? Because geography has everything to do with sunlight, which in turn has everything to do with vitamin D levels in the general population. None of this was even mentioned in the study, meaning that we have no way to know whether vitamin D levels were actually improved by supplementation.

* The study did not compensate for poor hydrochloric acid production in the elderly

If you want to design a study that shows calcium supplements to be useless, strategy number one is to choose a segment of the population that has poor hydrochloric acid production. Namely, the elderly. Guess who was chosen for this study? The elderly, of course. And a good nutritionist would have told them to supplement with acidic substances or digestive enzymes in order to enhance the chemical breakdown of calcium in preparation for absorption in the small intestine. Yet this was never addressed in the study.

The doses of supplements used were not therapeutic

This is one of the oldest tricks in the book: if you want to “prove” that supplements are useless, just run a clinical trial using very low doses. In this particular case, calcium was supplemented at 1000mg, and vitamin D and 800 IU per day. While these doses aren’t ridiculously low (like we’ve seen in some vitamin E studies), they are nowhere near the levels that would be used therapeutically. A good compounding pharmacist might recommend double that dose of calcium, at least for a time. And vitamin D for therapeutic use in those who are deficient is often prescribed at a dose of 50,000 IU for short durations, followed by a maintenance dose closer to 800 IU.

The control group was given information on diet and strategies for reducing the risk of fractures and falls
You have to remember that the logic of this study says that calcium and vitamin D supplements are useless because there was no difference in the number of fractures between the study group and the control group. But if you could find another way to reduce fractures in the control group, then you could effectively make the supplements in the study group appear useless. This was accomplished by giving the control group information on improving their diet and reducing the risk of bone fractures.

So it could very well be that both groups had a reduced risk of bone fractures, but since that reduction was the same in both groups, the study declares that supplements are useless. The key here is in recognizing that the control group wasn’t really a control group. It was another variable group, where the method of intervention was education rather than supplements. If you teach a thousand senior citizens how to prevent falls, you’re going to see a reduction in falls and fractures, regardless of bone mineral density. It could mean that education is a very good strategy — just as good as supplements. They could be equally effective at preventing bone fractures.

Again, not one of the mainstream press stories that reported this bothered to examine the facts on this study. I haven’t found a single journalist covering this study who actually looked at the structure of the study with any degree of skepticism. It just goes to show you: the mainstream press will print anything, no matter how ridiculous the conclusions, as long as it appears to come from a legitimate source and agrees with the financial interests of advertisers.

The bottom line? This study was poorly designed, poor followed, and ultimately comes up as junk science. Yet it’s being touted by pharmaceutical-funded newspapers and media outlets around the world as an “A-ha!” moment, proving that calcium supplements and vitamin D supplements are useless. Faced with this information, what should consumers do now? Take more drugs, no doubt. Drugs which, by the way, are typically only “proven” through the construction of carefully distorted, selective studies that exaggerate their benefits and minimize their risks.
To think that calcium and vitamin D don’t enhance bone health is, all by itself, rather astounding. Dozens of previous (and better designed) studies have looked at this issue and have shown a clear 30% - 40% reduction in bone fractures due to wise supplementation with calcium and vitamin D. But organized medicine wants you to think that somehow the body doesn’t need nutrition. Instead, its promoters want you to believe that only prescription drugs can help you — as if toxic, synthetic chemicals were somehow more important for human health than the natural bone-building substances provided by nature for which our bodies were actually designed.

You can add this study to the heap of advice designed to discredit nutritional supplements. Defenders of organized medicine and pharmaceuticals will stop at nothing to try to convince the entire population to throw away their supplements and buy more prescription drugs. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll just try to get the FDA to ban all the supplements as was recently tried in Europe via the CODEX Food Supplements Directive, which sought to outlaw thousands of nutritional products.

For anyone really interested in how to have healthy bones, here’s how to do it. My own Bone Mineral Density score (BMD) is 2.51, which you can see on my health statistics page. This score is very high when it comes to Bone Mineral Density. I did it by avoiding all prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs and working only with naturopathic physicians, not MDs.

Here’s what works:

1. Get calcium from natural sources — green leafy vegetables, nuts, beans, legumes, spirulina, calcium supplements, and so on.

2. Take your calcium supplements with acidic foods or supplements — in order to assimilate the calcium in your digestive tract, you need to be able to break it down at a chemical level. Most younger people have no trouble with the production of hydrochloric acid for this purpose, but older people tend to have impaired acid production. This is especially pronounced in those over 60. So consuming acidic foods or supplements (black vinegar supplements, tomatoes or tomato sauce, pineapples, etc.) can help with digestion and assimilation of calcium and other minerals.
3. Get natural sunlight on your skin to produce vitamin D — the majority of Americans are vitamin D deficient, and without adequate sunshine on your skin, you’ll probably never get enough (unless you supplement with cod liver oil or other natural vitamin D sources). Without adequate vitamin D, calcium cannot be absorbed in your small intestine.
4. Engage in weight-bearing exercise — by stressing your bones with weight-bearing exercise, your body will respond by creating stronger bones, with higher bone mineral density. (Be sure to work with a doctor, naturopath or physical therapist before engaging in any exercise program.)
5. Stop believing every news story you read that says “vitamins don’t work” and “you should take more drugs.” These are pure disinformation, designed to boost the profits of Big Pharma at the expense of your health. Be a skeptical consumer.

Today, it’s amazing what passes for “scientific” medicine. Under the guise of so-called science, medical researchers can come up with any conclusion they want. The vitamin E studies are a perfect example of this: they were carefully constructed with gerrymandered
statistical curves to create the illusion that vitamin E is somehow bad for your health.

With the right motivation, researchers can design a study to say anything they want. They could create a study that “proves” water is bad for you… or sunlight… or air. Just because some new study has been announced in the mainstream press doesn’t mean it’s true. More often than not, it’s just a way to appease their advertisers — the drug companies.

As usual, it’s all about selling you more high-priced drugs rather than giving you information that might actually help you stay healthy. If you want REAL health information, read NewsTarget.com. Or check out the ebooks at TruthPublishing.com. That’s where you’ll get courageous, straight talk on how to be a healthy human being, without spending a dime on prescription drugs.

Are the coral calcium claims by Bob Barefoot credible and believable

A reader asks, “Mike, I recently ran across a book titled ‘The Calcium Factor,’ authored by Robert Barefoot. He extols the almost miraculous healing powers of calcium, especially coral calcium. And I would like to know what you think about this. The fact that Bob Barefoot seems to have significant financial interest in the promotion of coral calcium causes me to regard with caution research and testimonials and his strong endorsement of coral calcium. Also, if one is supplementing with whole food supplements such as Alive or Juice Plus, is it also necessary to supplement with calcium and other vitamins and minerals?”

Well, first off, I want to applaud you for remaining skeptical of the health claims described in the book, “The Calcium Factor,” not because of whether or not they are true, but because the person authoring the book has a significant financial interest in your purchasing calcium.

As you know, I never have a financial interest in the products that I recommend or review on this website. And, I think it is a great conflict of interest for anyone to both write about a nutritional supplement and sell that same nutritional supplement. It doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. It just means that their information must be taken in context.

I encourage you and other readers to live day-to-day with that kind of skepticism. We should all be skeptics of people who are trying to sell us products, especially if it’s drugs or herbs or vitamins, because anything can have an element of hype or exaggeration to it. Just because someone is offering something that seems to be a natural vitamin or mineral supplement doesn’t mean it’s not being over-hyped.

In fact, there are many hucksters and con artists in the nutritional supplement industry, just as there are in the pharmaceutical industry. So, my position has never been that all nutritional supplements are good and that all pharmaceuticals are bad. It’s just that if you’re looking for what’s truly healthy you’re only going to find them from the natural world and never from the world of manufactured, synthesized drugs.

The category of nutritional supplements is definitely where you’re going to find those supplemental products that enhance health rather than harming your health in the way that patent medications do. But, getting back to the question of calcium and more specifically, coral calcium, the fact is that Bob Barefoot is very much right about almost everything he says about calcium, but only for those people who are calcium deficient. In other words, the healing powers of calcium are indeed miraculous if you don’t have enough calcium, because calcium is so intimately involved in human physiology that a lack of calcium has terrible systemic effects.

Most people tend to think of calcium as only having one purpose, and that is supporting bone health. And certainly, calcium is critical for having good bone density, but calcium is also critical for your nervous system and nerve function, which makes it essential for cardiovascular health. In other words, if you don’t have enough calcium, your heart cannot contract in the way it is supposed to. Your brain will not function in as healthy a manner as it could if you had plenty of calcium. Your acid-alkaline balance may be disrupted without calcium. Your immune system function may be off. And certainly, your skeletal system is going to be affected, as well.

There are many systems in the body that need calcium. And, to a person who is calcium deficient, the addition of supplementary calcium can indeed seem quite miraculous. So, there’s nothing incorrect about stating that calcium is a miraculous supplement. In fact, I think the human body is a living, breathing miracle all by itself. And the way that nature works is a miracle. So, there is nothing incorrect about using the term “miraculous” to describe the healing effects of some nutritional supplements.

The question becomes: How many people are calcium deficient? That is truly the relevant question in here, because if most of the population had sufficient quantities of calcium, then the claims made by Bob Barefoot on the benefits of calcium might be considered to be exaggerated. On the other hand, if the population were largely calcium deficient, then the claims describing the health benefits of calcium would have much broader application, and would be considered far more accurate.
Related article
Junk science: negative study on calcium and vitamin D supplements was poorly constructed, yet widely reported
So again, the question comes down to: “What is the incidence of calcium deficiency in the population?” And, this is where you’re going to find tremendous disagreement depending on who you talk to. In my own opinion, calcium deficiency is chronic and widespread. I think most Americans and most people in the civilized world who consume processed foods or manufactured foods do exhibit a calcium deficiency.

But, understand that conventionally trained doctors, physicians and even dieticians would strongly disagree with that, because they’re going off of Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) numbers. And, they’re saying that if a person meets the recommended daily allowance (RDA) requirements for vitamins and minerals, then that’s really all they need. In contrast, most nutritionists and people from the wellness world would say that the USRDA numbers are really just the minimum requirements needed to avoid nutritional deficiencies that cause diseases. They are not in any way descriptive of the optimum levels of nutrition for a human being.

Essentially, the whole argument about the benefits of calcium comes down to your position on the RDA numbers, or in other words, what you think is the recommended daily allowance or requirement of calcium in an adult human being. My own position, as I’ve stated, is that most of the population is chronically deficient in calcium.

It’s difficult to get sufficient calcium from a balanced diet
There are quite a few other related issues to this question beyond just whether or not Bob Barefoot is telling the truth about coral calcium. The biggest question, I think, is “Can people get sufficient quantities of usable calcium from the typical diet?” Now this is a favorite myth of conventional medicine, which is to say that all you need to have adequate nutrition is to eat three balanced meals a day, and you’ll get all the vitamins and minerals you need. You don’t need any supplementation whatsoever.

That’s a common myth promoted by people in conventional medicine who really don’t have the education or the understanding in nutrition that we would now consider to be authoritative. There have been significant advances in the understanding of nutrition over the last couple of decades. And yet, medical schools are still teaching nutrition as it was taught in the 1960s.

So, conventionally trained medical professionals are not going to understand this point, and most likely, they’re going to argue with you if you present them with this information because they’re not only wrong, but they also operate under the misimpression that they are right. The point I’m trying to make here is that based on my own calculations of the nutritional makeup of typical American food, the average person would have to consume 10,000 calories a day just to meet the minimum USRDA requirements for all the vitamins and minerals that are tracked by the USRDA chart.

10,000 calories a day is five times the food intake that an average adult human being should be consuming. In other words, you would have to eat ravenously — you would have to engage in non-stop, belly-splitting consumption. You’d be chewing food constantly just to get the essential vitamins and minerals into your diet that you’re supposed to get to avoid chronic disease.

And yet, at the same time, you’d be getting 10,000 calories, which is five times the calories you need, meaning that you’d be packing on pounds at the rate of around two pounds of body fat per day.

So, obviously this is not a strategy for being healthy. Yes, you would get all the vitamins and minerals you need, but you’d be spending five times as much on food and you’d be adding two pounds of body fat a day, unless you were engaged in some superhuman cardiovascular exercise program. Remember, even a guy like Lance Armstrong only burns about 5000 calories a day during the competition. So, to burn 10,000 calories a day is virtually impossible.

Supplementation is the answer for nutrition
What does this all mean? It means you have to supplement if you’re going to be healthy, and meet the minimum requirements for vitamins and minerals. So, what I’m saying is that the average American must take nutritional supplements if they want to prevent chronic disease, or even meet the basic minimum requirements for nutrient intake.

If you want to exceed those requirements and actually have superior health (that is health that goes beyond just preventing disease and actually taps into the mental and physical performance potential of the human being), then you will need to supplement at very high levels. You would need to supplement with superfoods or whole food supplements. And, the person asking this question mentioned Juice Plus or the Alive food supplements. These are excellent supplements.

Don’t get your calcium from cows
But, specifically, when it comes to calcium, you need to supplement it if you’re going to get adequate supplies of calcium in your system. And, here is where most people go wrong. They think the best source of calcium is cows’ milk. Why do they think that? Because that’s the message that the dairy industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over many, many years to inject into peoples’ minds. The public relations efforts and the advertising has paid off, people now mistakenly believe that cows’ milk is a great source of calcium.

Well, it simply isn’t a great source of calcium. In fact, it’s not even what I would consider a mediocre source of calcium. Why is that? First off, note that spirulina has far more calcium than milk on an ounce per ounce basis. So, if you really want to get some calcium into your system, supplement with spirulina. Remember, spirulina is harvested from the ocean. It has absorbed not only the macro minerals like calcium and magnesium, but also the trace minerals from the ocean waters. When you consume spirulina, you are automatically getting these minerals in a highly bio-available form.

Other good sources of calcium include green, leafy vegetable like spinach. The darker the vegetable, the more calcium it contains, generally speaking. So, if you want to get a lot of calcium into your diet, you can also consume increasing quantities of these green, leafy vegetables. That would include spinach, kale, broccoli, and of course, all of the popular salad greens, the darker the better.

What about coral calcium? As one reader pointed out to me in an email, coral calcium is essentially ground up limestone powder. And, I tend to agree with that assessment. It’s not calcium in a plant form. But the advantage of coral calcium over, say, cave limestone from caves in Missouri, is that the coral calcium also has the spectrum of minerals found in the ocean. In other words, you’re getting more than just calcium and you’re also getting trace minerals.

Unfortunately, coral calcium isn’t very high in the other macro minerals, such as magnesium and zinc, but it is high in trace minerals. So, it’s a great source of what I call inorganic calcium. You can also go the more expensive route and buy chelated calcium supplements from a variety of vitamin manufacturers like Twin Lab. Chelated calcium is yet more bio-available. It is more effective per ounce than other forms of calcium. But, is it more effective per dollar than other forms of calcium? I haven’t done that assessment myself, but my guess is that it’s both pricey and effective, meaning that you may be just as well off to spend your money on cheaper sources of calcium that have lower bio-availability, because you can afford to put more of that powder into your body.

Speaking of pricing, if you really want to get a good buy on coral calcium, you need to check out my book called “Secret Sources for Health Products” or what I just call ‘Secret Sources.’ In this book, which is currently offered free of charge to new subscribers, I reveal a fantastic source for buying coral calcium in bulk. It’s essentially the same nutritional makeup as any other coral calcium, but it’s a fraction of the price you might typically pay if you’re buying brand name coral calcium from a health food store.

Asthma explained by common allergy to milk and dairy products

The link between asthma and cows’ milk is familiar to many young asthma sufferers and their parents. I first became aware of the connection through my cousin’s experiences with his four-year-old son. Since infancy, my cousin’s son has experienced severe asthma attacks and has been hospitalized twice for asthma-related pneumonia. When his asthma attacks become more frequent or more severe, my cousin and his wife respond by temporarily eliminating milk and milk products from his diet, and it usually works. I always assumed that milk worsened his asthma by stimulating mucus production in his lungs. However, studies suggest that, either along with or instead of creating excess mucus, milk may worsen asthma due to an undiagnosed milk allergy.

“In all respiratory conditions, mucous-forming dairy foods, such as milk and cheese, can exacerbate clogging of the lungs and should be avoided,” writes Professor Gary Null in his Complete Encyclopedia of Natural Healing. Very simply, when more mucus accumulates in the lungs than can be expelled, asthma attacks develop. This belief has long been held in practiced medicine, and many medical doctors still stand behind this theory.

At the same time, many other doctors and researchers are now beginning to feel that undiagnosed milk allergies may be the underlying problem behind the link between milk and asthma. As Dr. Robert M. Giller writes in Natural Prescriptions, eliminating dairy products from the diets of many adult and child asthma patients helps “not because dairy products stimulate mucus production but because they’re very common causes of allergy, upper-respiratory allergies and asthma (which may be an allergy in itself).”

“Milk is one of the two or three most common food allergens in the American diet,” says allergy specialist Dr. James Braly in Bill Gottlieb’s book Alternative Cures. In fact, Dr. Frank Oski, the chief of pediatrics at the John Hopkins School of Medicine, believes that 50 percent of all schoolchildren may be allergic to milk, though many of them remain undiagnosed. Some researchers believe that the figure may be even higher, up to 60 percent of children, according to Dr. Charles R. Attwoods’s book, A Vegetarian Doctor Speaks Out. When most people think of milk allergies, they think of anaphylactic shock — a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction that can only be relieved with a shot of epinephrine. However, allergies sometimes manifest in very different ways, and these may change throughout a person’s life.

In Get Healthy Now, Professor Null explains a milk allergy’s changing symptoms: “Even if the symptoms are not the same, the underlying allergy may be. A child who has suffered milk-associated asthma, for instance, may have severe acne as a teenager. The milk allergy is still there, but its symptoms have moved to a different organ system, often misleading the patient and physician into thinking that the original allergy has been outgrown.” According to Alternative Medicine, up to half of all infants may be sensitive to cows’ milk. As a result, symptoms of an underlying milk allergy may start as early as infancy, only manifested as eczema, a symptom that may remain later on in childhood and adulthood. Furthermore, in addition to asthma and eczema, an underlying milk allergy may manifest as bronchitis, sinusitis, autoimmune disorders, frequent colds and ear infections and even behavioral problems.

Antibiotics in milk
Like any dairy allergy, the milk protein is probably the cause of allergy-related asthma. However, according to Dr. Oski, some children and adults may not be allergic to the milk itself, but rather the small amount of antibiotics passed into the milk from dairy cows. Dr. Oski explains this phenomenon: “Antibiotics, most commonly penicillin, are given to cows for the treatment of mastitis, an inflammation of the udders. Cows are not supposed to be milked for 48 hours after receiving penicillin. Often this precaution is not followed and then penicillin appears in the milk in small quantities.” If you or your child is part of the estimated one percent of the United States population who develop symptoms of penicillin allergy after drinking antibiotic-contaminated milk, you may be able to stop your allergy by drinking milk from cows that are not treated with antibiotics. To be on the safe side however, you may want to entirely eliminate cows’ milk from your or your asthmatic child’s diet.         Related article
Combat childhood asthma naturally with the Buteyko breathing method
Whether milk causes excess mucus production, is an undiagnosed allergy or a combination or both — research suggests that milk definitely worsens asthma. Accordingly, a diet that is free of both milk and meat, another common allergen, can greatly lessen asthma symptoms. According to a study of 25 patients reported in Jean Carper’s book, Food: Your Miracle Medicine, after following a milk- and meat-free diet for only four months, 71 percent of the patients experienced an improvement in their asthma symptoms. After a year, asthma improved in 92 percent of the patients. On a larger scale, Dr. Joseph Pizzorno, President Emeritus of Bastyr University, found that 25 percent of respiratory patients experienced long-term improvement after following a vegan diet, a diet that contains no animal products — dairy, eggs and meat — whatsoever.

Plenty of calcium from other food sources
While considering a milk-free diet for themselves or their children, many people worry that doing so will result in a calcium deficiency. In a Washington press conference, Suzanne Havala, registered dietician and co-author of the American Dietetic Association’s 1992 edition of its position paper on vegetarian diets, said that after weaning, humans do not need to drink milk: “Vegetarians and their children get all the calcium they need from leafy vegetables, broccoli, tahini and tofu made with calcium sulfate.” So, according to research, if you have asthma, you can happily adjust to life without cows’ milk without really missing anything, except severe asthma attacks.

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