Hey it's time to talk about your health!

 

As you may already know, I have been on a journey to better health. I have been trying to eliminate toxins in my everyday life and developing a healthy regime of vitamins and supplements.

My wife has been taking Shaklee Vitamins for many years, and has introduced them to me, or more correctly forced me to take them. Of course, she was right because once I started taking them, I immediately felt the positive effects and I feel much better.  People are always asking me about what I am cooking since I have to take into account our specialized diet. We have a gluten-free lifestyle and we try to protect ourselves from the many attacks on our system from the toxins in food. Bioengineered food does not live here! Corn oil, canola oil, seed oils and other crap is not to be found in my cupboard. Many companies hide behind deceptive labeling laws using terms like “Natural Flavors” to cover up the use of many toxic ingredients that are dumped into their overly processed food products. For example, you can find MSG labeled as “Natural Flavors” so when you order your Low Mein tell them, “No Natural Flavors.”

 We decided to take this one step further and became Ambassadors for Shaklee products. This way we can use the knowledge we have accumulated to help others also live a clean healthy life. Put down that Windex bottle and let me help you save money and keep a healthy household all at the same time.

Foods, personal care products, and cleaning supplies can be riddled with harmful toxins and ingredients that can build up in your body to destroy your health. Why would you buy a product that contained these toxins when you can purchase a clean alternative? Heavy metals, harmful preservatives, pesticides, and other suspect ingredients require constant vigilance in everyday purchases.

I trust Shaklee products because they are clean and devoid of all these problems. They have been in business for more than sixty years and devote a large amount of their resources to the science behind their products. Real science, not Fauci science. They are the direct opposite of Big Pharma as their focus is on the health of their clients and not solely on money making. Sure. they make money but they also are concerned with your well-being. The recent experiences we have all had with the bogus COVID vaccines should lead us to focus on companies that use clean ingredients instead of chemicals.

For example, Shaklee cleaning products are plant-based and do not rely on the petrochemical additives that can be found in so many other commercial brands. Their personal care products are also clean and devoid of harmful additives. Their vitamins are naturally based and have the unique status of using live enzymes instead of the “dead” chemically formulated vitamins you grab off of the shelf at CVS. This aids in their adsorption and the interaction with your body which will lead to you noticing the difference in how you feel almost immediately. They always go above and beyond industry standards to ensure that their products are of the highest quality possible. They even have gummies for those of you who don’t have any teeth (you know who you are buddy).

If you are interested in getting some great vitamins and non-toxic personal care and cleaning products, then simply follow this link: Shaklee Lisa Dolan

 You can also find the link on our website www.leeleesvalise.com. Look for the Shaklee link in the navigation bar. Or contact me directly and I will be happy to talk to you about it.

"When Surgeons Operate On Two Patients At Once"

Via Drudge:  Indiana orthopedic surgeon James Rickert regards double-booking as a form of bait-and-switch. “The only reason it has continued is that patients are asleep,” said Rickert, president of the Society for Patient-Centered Orthopedics, a doctor group.

“Having a fellow so you can run two rooms helps augment your income,” he added. “You can bill for six procedures: You do three and the fellow does three.” The critical portion of the operation required by Medicare and designated by the surgeon can mean “running in and checking two screws for 10 seconds.”

Defenders of the practice, which has been the subject of a handful of studies with mixed results, say it can be done safely and allows more patients to receive care.

“It’s extremely important for us to make sure [all surgeries are] done with the highest quality,” said Peter Dunn, Mass General’s executive medical director of perioperative administration. Officials at his hospital, Dunn said in a recent interview, have “never traced back a quality issue” to concurrent surgery, which involves a minority of procedures.

(Link to the whole article)

"We’re All Guinea Pigs in a Failed Decades-Long Diet Experiment"

Via Instapundit:  Let's say you want to lose some weight. Which of these foods would you choose: A skim-milk latte, or the same drink with whole milk? A low-cal breakfast bar or steak and eggs? A salad tossed in light dressing or the same salad doused with buttermilk ranch?

If you're like most Americans, you either aren't sure how to answer, or you're very sure—but very wrong. And it's not your fault. It's the fault, experts say, of decades of flawed or misleading nutrition advice—advice that was never based on solid science.

The US Department of Agriculture, along with the agency that is now called Health and Human Services, first released a set of national dietary guidelines back in 1980. That 20-page booklet trained its focus primarily on three health villains: fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

Recently, research has come out strongly in support of dietary fat and cholesterol as benign, rather than harmful, additions to person's diet. Saturated fat seems poised for a similar pardon.

"The science that these guidelines were based on was wrong," Robert Lustig, a neuro-endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Tonic. In particular, the idea that cutting fat from a person's diet would offer some health benefit was never backed by hard evidence, Lustig said.

Just this week, some of Lustig's colleagues at UCSF released an incendiary report revealing that in the 1960s, sugar industry lobbyists funded research that linked heart disease to fat and cholesterol while downplaying evidence that sugar was the real killer.

(Link to more)

"Researchers Confront an Epidemic of Loneliness"

"Researchers have found mounting evidence linking loneliness to physical illness and to functional and cognitive decline. As a predictor of early death, loneliness eclipses obesity."

John T. Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and director of the university’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, has been studying loneliness since the 1990s. He said loneliness is an aversive signal much like thirst, hunger or pain.
“Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hunger,” he said. Yet the very word “lonely” carries a negative connotation, Professor Cacioppo said, signaling social weakness, or an inability to stand on one’s own.

It is only in the past several years that loneliness has been examined through a medical, rather than psychological or sociological, lens. Dr. Perissinotto, the University of California, San Francisco geriatrician, decided to study loneliness when she began to sense there were factors affecting her patients’ health that she was failing to capture.

Using data from a large national survey of older adults, in 2012 Dr. Perissinotto analyzed the relationship between self-reported loneliness and health outcomes in people older than 60. Of 1,604 participants in the study, 43 percent reported feelings of loneliness, and these individuals had significantly higher rates of declining mobility, difficulty in performing routine daily activities, and death during six years of follow-up. The association of loneliness with mortality remained significant even after adjusting for age, economic status, depression and other common health problems.

Dr. Perissinotto is also interested in examining the link between loneliness and suicidal thoughts, as there has been little research in that area. She hopes to study The Friendship Line, a 24-hour, toll-free, loneliness call-in line run by the Institute on Aging in San Francisco that is also a suicide prevention hotline.

Although plenty of research into loneliness takes place in the United States, Britain remains well ahead in addressing the problem. (Lots more)

"Even if you exercise, too much sitting time is bad"

CBS News:  The exact mechanisms behind the effect aren't yet clear.

"There are many important factors we don't understand about sedentary time yet," Young said. She stressed that, "the types of studies available identify trends but don't prove cause and effect."

"We don't have information about how much sedentary behavior is bad for health -- the best advice at this time is to 'sit less and move more,'" she added.

How much more? According to the AHA, people should try to get at least 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a day to reach the recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week.

Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum is a preventive cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. She agreed that, based on the evidence, sitting is more than just a "lack of moving."

"The real risk simply comes down to the amount we sit, without there being a true antidote [such as exercise]," Steinbaum said.

Still, society has evolved to encourage sitting, she added.

Not the Onion: "Dormant Butt Syndrome May Be To Blame For Knee, Hip and Back Pain"

Millions of people in the U.S. suffer from knee, hip or back pain, and experts at The Ohio State Wexner Medical Center say dormant butt syndrome (DBS) may be the cause. 

Dormant butt syndrome refers to the tightness of the hip flexors and weakness of the gluteal muscles. When gluteal muscles are weak, the muscles and joints around them absorb strain during exercise, often causing hamstring injuries, back pain, hip pain and knee injuries that could lead to surgery.

“The entire body works as a linked system, and a lot of times when people come in with knee or hip injuries, it’s actually because their butt isn’t strong enough,” said Chris Kolba, a physical therapist at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. “The rear end should act as support for the entire body and as a shock absorber for stress during exercise. But if it’s too weak, other parts of the body take up the slack and often results in injury.”   

Kolba coined the term “dormant butt syndrome”... (more)

"The clothes may stay on"

"Some Minnesotans turn to snuggling with strangers"

After a few hours of conversation in a room at the Super 8 motel in Roseville, Marissa Weiss fell asleep with a man’s arm around her waist.

The man, however, was not her boyfriend. In fact, they had met only hours before. Weiss, 22, was a “professional snuggler.” For $80 an hour, she would cuddle, comfort and caress for a fee.

“There’s no undertone or hidden message,” said the college student from River Falls, Wis., who quit the side gig in January to focus on classes. “It’s just platonic cuddling.”...

“The argument for human touch is particularly poign­ant in our culture now because we don’t go shake hands and sit with people as often as we used to,” said Chandler Yorkhall, integrative medicine practitioner at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. “Research bears out that touch is as important as food. Medicine doesn’t have everything we need; we can also benefit from things that touch into our primal human needs, such as touch.”

In Portland, cuddle enthusiasts gathered last Valentine’s Day for CuddleCon, a cuddling convention. National car service Uber is getting in on the snuggle phenomenon, too, by delivering kittens to people in cities, including Minneapolis, for a 15-minute snuggle. And in Virginia, a goat cheese farm was inundated with responses to its request for volunteers to snuggle baby goats.

Cozying up to a furry animal is a no-brainer, but spooning a stranger?

“It totally makes sense to me,” Yorkhall said. “It makes you feel better. It’s a fix in a weird way.” (there is more)

A group "cuddle puddle" at Outside Lands, Aug. 9, 2015

"Mystery brain disorder robs patients of their words"

AP: It's called primary progressive aphasia, and researchers said Sunday they're finding better ways to diagnose the little-known syndrome. That will help people whose thoughts are lucid but who are verbally locked in to get the right kind of care.

"I'm using a speech device to talk to you," Robert Voogt of Virginia Beach, Virginia, said by playing a recording from a phone-sized assistive device at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "I have trouble speaking, but I can understand you."

PPA wasn't identified as a separate disorder until the 1980s, and while specialists estimate thousands of Americans may have it, there's no good count. Families may not even seek care because they assume a loved one's increasingly garbled attempts to communicate are because of age-related dementia, said Dr. Argye Elizabeth Hillis of Johns Hopkins University. Often, it's when those people reach neurologists who realize they aren't repeating questions or forgetting instructions that the diagnosis emerges.

"Nobody's talking to them, nobody's involving them. It's very sad," said Dr. Margaret Rogers of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Yet for many, "they can handle their own finances, they can drive, they can appreciate music. There's a lot that still works for them."

Speech and language are hugely complex. Just to speak requires activating 100 muscles between the lungs and lips to produce at least 14 distinct sounds per second, said Dr. Joseph Duffy of the Mayo Clinic. 

(read the whole thing)

"New Clues Why Women Get Broken-Heart Syndrome"

"Study comes to surprising conclusion about mysterious malady’s causes, suggests possible remedies"

Experts say broken-heart syndrome, which most often affects women in their 60s or older, can be brought on by strong emotions, such as grief, anger and anxiety, or by physical stress. A common trigger is a loved one’s illness or death, while for some patients there is no clear-cut cause for an attack. “It is a romantic notion, but you really can get this from heartache,” says Dr. Reynolds, whose study was published online in November in the American Journal of Cardiology.

Roberta Silver, who participated in Dr. Reynolds’s study, recalls driving in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2007 when she suddenly felt her heart pounding. She pulled over to a cafe, where she became intensely ill. An ambulance took her to a hospital, and she was told she had suffered a heart attack. But a series of tests, including an angiogram, all turned up negative, she says.

“I had no blockage, nothing,” recalls Ms. Silver, who was visiting California from her home in New Jersey. After several days in the hospital, doctors concluded she had suffered broken-heart syndrome. Ms. Silver, who is 70, still isn’t sure what caused the event, and she hasn’t had a repeat episode. But she was ill with an upper respiratory infection and under stress at the time: A cousin she had been close to had died and Ms. Silver was planning to attend his funeral in San Francisco. And preparations for her son’s wedding were proving upsetting.

Broken-heart syndrome can at times be brought on by intense joy and excitement. Vera Compagnino, 53, who also participated in the recent study, remembers how elated she felt one October day 10 years ago watching her son playing football. “It was such an exciting game,” recalls Ms. Compagnino, a teacher’s assistant in Staten Island, N.Y. In her exuberance, she began chanting some cheer songs from her high school days and vowed to do a cartwheel if her son’s team scored a touchdown.

Suddenly, Ms. Compagnino started feeling an intense pain in her chest “like an elephant was sitting on me,” she recalled. Yet at the hospital, doctors found nothing on her angiogram that was amiss --- no sign of clogged arteries. She became a patient of Dr. Reynolds, who believes anxiety played a role in bringing on the attack and has tried to guide her in the hope of preventing future episodes.

There were 6,230 cases of people in the U.S. hospitalized with broken-heart syndrome in 2012, according to a recent study. Patients usually heal within days or weeks without residual damage to the heart. But complications can occur, as well as fatalities.

Protect retinas, sleep better; blue-light canceler download

"[Too much time looking at the computer screen is] not good for our eyes. LED screens emit a great deal of blue light, and according to the Vision Council, "cumulative and constant exposure to blue light can damage retinal cells."

What's more, even the non-harmful portion of blue light sends a signal to our brains that it is daytime, revving up our heart rate and alertness. It mimics the sun, basically. You do not want to be lying in bed at night, having brushed your teeth and set your alarm, staring into the sun. It's not a recipe for good sleep.

...Exposure to blue light at night has even been linked to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. (It is not entirely clear why; it likely has to do with suppressing the secretion of melatonin.)

There are all sorts of solutions to the blue-light problem. The most obvious is just not to look at screens for two or three hours before you go to bed. Unfortunately, a substantial proportion of my professional work gets done in the two to three hours before I go to bed, so that's not really an option for me.

Hardware solutions include adhesive screen protectors that filter blue light and even orange goggles, if you want to look extra cool after the sun goes down.

But by far the easiest step is just to install f.lux. It's free for Windows, Mac, and iPhones/iPads**. (There's not yet a version for Android, but there are plenty of alternatives; I use one called CF.lumen.)"

http://www.vox.com/2015/11/2/9658952/blue-light-app

Study: Sitting for long periods doesn’t make death more imminent

You've read the warnings: "Sitting will kill you." And many of you have sought out standing desks, fearful that a chair will only hasten the end of your mortal existence.

Well, take a deep breath, relax and add this to the mix of research out there on the pros and cons of standing at work: a study published Tuesday in the International Journal of Epidemiology found that sitting is not associated with an increased risk of dying.

Researchers tracked 16 years' worth of health data from 5,132 people in the Whitehall II study cohort. Participants reported their total time sitting and how long they sat during four different situations: at work, watching television, leisure time and non-television leisure time. Researchers also tracked time spent walking daily and on physical activity.

After controlling for a number of factors, including diet and general health, researchers found the overall mortality risk for these participants wasn't influenced by how long they sat or by the kind of sitting. And the researchers cautioned that too much emphasis on not sitting shouldn't take the place of promoting physical activity.

"Our study overturns current thinking on the health risks of sitting and indicates that the problem lies in the absence of movement rather than the time spent sitting itself," study author Melvyn Hillsdon of the University of Exeter said in a statement. "Any stationary posture where energy expenditure is low may be detrimental to health, be it sitting or standing." (read more)

“Apparently I am still indestructible”

"Lemmy, the grizzled perpetual badass who fronts metal icons Motörhead, has seen healthier days. His band was forced to cancel a few shows earlier this year when the nearly 70-year-old rocker was stricken with gastric distress and dehydration, and he now walks with a the aid of a stick because “my legs are fucked.” He also suffers from diabetes, but he’s found an interesting way to combat the illness; instead of his usual Jack Daniels and coke, Lemmy has switched to vodka and orange juice in order to stay healthy."

“I like orange juice better,” he told The Guardian in a recent interview. “So, Coca-Cola can fuck off.”

“I can’t stop touring because I will die”

"Dick Dale... the man hailed as the King of Surf Guitar has had rectal cancer twice. He’s currently in renal failure and refuses to go on dialysis, and he suffers from diabetes and from vertebrae that are so damaged “that every time I stand up it’s like a double-edge sword going into my spine.”..."

At 78 years old and with this many health issues, Dale should be dead, or at the very least resting at home. But he’s not. When he spoke with CP by phone from his California ranch on July 16, he was making the final preparations for a three-month, 25-city tour stretching from Denver to Boston and back home.

Dale isn’t about to drive cross-country with his wife, Lana — herself in chronic pain due to multiple sclerosis — because he craves money to live high on the hog. He’s doing it to pay for medical patches and pouches so he can change his colostomy bag more frequently than insurance will allow.

“I have to raise $3,000 every month to pay for the medical supplies I need to stay alive, and that’s on top of the insurance that I pay for,” Dale explains. “The hospital says change your patch once a week. No! If you don’t change that patch two times a day, the fecal matter eats through your flesh and causes the nerves to rot and they turn black, and the pain is so excruciating that you can’t let anything touch it. That has happened to me because I was following the orders of the hospital.”

They’ve also told him it’s OK to wash out and reuse the bags, but Dale says that the bacteria has nearly killed him and he won’t risk it. Because despite the pain, he’s a man who still loves life and wants to keep on living it — even if that means taxing and stressing his body to the outer limits.

“Sure, I’d love to stay home and build ships in a bottle and spend time with my wife in Hawaii, but I have to perform to save my life,” he says. “I’ve been living like this for the past 15 years, but I’m still here and opening my eyes each morning.”

Dick Dale video at the jump...

Pica: "mud mask for the gut"

"Eating dirt is not just some weird fetish in the South. Hundreds of thousands of people eat dirt around the world. Forrester, an assistant professor of photography at Troy University, says he has spoken with shop owners who receive orders from as far away as London."

Eating dirt has a unique history. For starters, it's not a recent phenomenon. There's evidence that our ancestors were eating dirt at least 2 million years ago, when Homo sapiens were still Homo habilis.

In her book, Craving Earth, Young says eating dirt is one component of a disorder known as pica, in which people compulsively crave things that aren't food, like starch, charcoal and ice.

"Cardiac arrest, threats of divorce, broken dentures, thousands of dollars in dental works — none of this deters people when they have these cravings," says Young. "I've talked to women throughout East Africa and the U.S., and they all talk about this stuff with this incredible fondness and enjoyment."...

Paul Schroeder, a geologist specializing in kaolin at the University of Georgia, says while the habit may have evolved as a protective measure, it may be harmful to our health.

Clay's amazing binding properties could backfire and absorb useful nutrients, which is particularly dangerous for pregnant women, he says.

I recall my stepmother had this condition during a couple of her pregnancies. Her sister's husband, Manuel, was a dirt dump truck hauler. He knew where to find the chalk dirt she craved.

"Even if it is not very solid data...

"... we can say definitely that there are drug problems in most parts of the world," said Theo Vos, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the study's senior author."

LONDON (AP) — Marijuana is the most popular illegal drug used worldwide, but addictions to popular painkillers like Vicodin, Oxycontin and codeine kill the most people, according to the first-ever global survey of illicit drug abuse.

In addition to cannabis and opioid painkillers, scientists analyzed abuse of cocaine and amphetamines in 2010, largely based on previous studies. Ecstasy and hallucinogens weren't included, because there weren't enough data. The researchers found that for all the drugs studied, men in their 20s had the highest rates of abuse. The worst-hit countries were Australia, Britain, Russia and the U.S. The study was published online Thursday in the journal, Lancet.

But there were few concrete numbers to rely on and researchers used modeling techniques to come up with their estimates.

Global burden of disease attributable to illicit drug use and dependence: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010

Background:

No systematic attempts have been made to estimate the global and regional prevalence of amphetamine, cannabis, cocaine, and opioid dependence, and quantify their burden. We aimed to assess the prevalence and burden of drug dependence, as measured in years of life lived with disability (YLDs), years of life lost (YLLs), and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).

Skipping all the way down...

Funding:

Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.