Make your own summer sunshine

Lazy summer days call for a long, cool drink and home made lemonade really sums up the essence of summer. Full of vitamin C, it will top up your immune system, and with the addition of some organic honey and stimulating ginger you will get a good dose of B vitamins too so make up a jugful and head for the garden.

Honey Ginger Lemonade – Ingredients

1 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup peeled fresh ginger slices
2 sprigs fresh mint
2 cups still water 4 cups ice cubes

Instructions:

Put the juice, honey, ginger, and chopped sprigs of the mint in a large jug and stir, pressing the mint and ginger down to break them up and release lots of their flavour. Add the water, stir until the honey dissolves, then add the ice, strain into long glasses, add a sprig of mint for decoration, sit back and relax.

By the way, if you suffer from hayfever then use a locally produced honey to help build up your resistance – it really will make a difference.

Salad days

One good thing about hot weather is that it encourages us to eat more healthily. Even if you are not a fan of what my father persistently referred to as ‘rabbit food’, once the temperature rises it is an option that many people look on more favourably. If it’s not one of your personal favourites, could you learn to at least look on it with kindliness as eating just one salad a day really is amazingly good for you.

A study conducted by the UCLA School of Public Health and Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center has just revealed that those who eat salads and raw vegetables have considerably higher levels of vitamins C, E, B6, and folic acid — key nutrients in promoting a healthy immune system and reducing the risk of obesity, heart disease and other chronic illnesses.

Just one salad a day goes a long way to meeting the Government’s recommended daily allowance of vitamins and minerals – and that RDA is well below what any nutritionist would recommend so maybe two salads a day? In the USA, less than 50% of the population meets the daily recommendation for vegetables, and I suspect the Brits are not too far behind them. What is particularly deficient in the average diet are the vital water-soluble vitamins C and B complex which need to be ingested daily as the body does not store them. The raw vegetables in salads provide a good source of these vitamins, plus you get fibre for better digestion and antioxidants for boosting immunity.

Interestingly, clinical trials have shown that adding salad dressing increases the absorption of certain nutrients which require oil to be fully metabolised – these include A, D, E and K. Choose olive oil or omega 3 and 6 oils from flax seed or a similar source for the most benefit.

Oh really?

I know many doctors are sceptical of alternative medicine and its benefits, but according to one story from the States it is really only safe to try it when the patient is dead. A Chinese woman of 19 underwent cranial surgery at an American hospital, but she died two weeks later. She was declared dead, but was kept on a ventilator to allow her parents to get to the hospital and see her. On arrival, the father asked that she be given a Traditional Chinese Medicine concoction, which he said was routinely used in his society for patients in a coma.

The doctors had several conversations with the father, but couldn’t see how the herb could help a patient who was, to all intents and purposes, dead. Perplexed, they called in the hospital’s ethics committee to ask whether they could administer the substance while the patient remained on a ventilator.

After much deliberation, the committee sanctioned the use of the herb as it offered “psychological benefits to the family and the absence of risk to the patient (since she was dead).” As a life-long believer in combining the best of medical knowledge with the vast experience of treatment from the many traditional (ie alternative) systems of medicine, I can only hope this was not typical of most medical staff’s beliefs. I know doctors and nurses in the UK who allow homoeopathy, aromatherapy and even acupuncture for pain relief in childbirth in some hospitals – let’s hope that attitude spreads.

Yet more benefits of green tea

As I have now trailed so many benefits of this ‘wonder’ tea, I am amazed the supermarket shelves haven’t been stripped bare, and yet here is another one. You know that it is packed with powerful antioxidants with lots of great health bonuses, but recently scientists discovered that green tea increased the effectiveness of certain antibiotics by as much as 99.99%…even when pitted against antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

This was a 12-month study at Alexandria University in Egypt and the results show that green tea boosted the performance of several antibiotics used in the treatment of 28 different disease-causing bacteria — including several strains of Staphylococcus. For example, 20 percent of previously drug-resistant bacteria were killed when green tea was combined with cephalosporin. This is good news because Cephalosporin is a widely used antibiotic – however many strains of bacteria have developed immunity against it.

Green tea was also shown to effectively support the antibiotics tetracycline, cefuroxime and it helped prevent the production of beta-lactamases-substances produced by bacteria allowing them to develop resistance to antibiotics.

So if you combine drinking green tea when on antibiotics you will help them be more effective and if you are drinking it regularly anyway then hopefully you won’t need the antibiotics at all, or in such quantity.

Risk of baby bottles – FDA keeps quiet

Information from the USA claims that plastics used in baby bottle feeders which contain the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) may cancer and diabetes. This is obviously a major concern but what is even more worrying is that America’s health regulator – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – has been suspected of sitting on the data and may be subpoenaed to release records about the safety of the bottles and infant formula liners.

The FDA has claimed the products are safe, but critics claim this is based on just two studies, which were both funded by the American Plastics Council – and you may be forgiven for thinking they would say that wouldn’t they? Only one of the studies was ever published and peer reviewed and many independent studies into BPA have linked the chemical to cancer, diabetes and obesity. Bart Stupak, a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce that is considering the subpoena, said: “While many scientists have raised concerns about the safety of bisphenol A, the FDA seems to have relied only upon science paid for by the plastics industry’s lobbying group.”

A rosy outlook for arthritis pain

As a child I used to go off into the hedgerows gathering rosehips every autumn, and taking them to school as part of a massive country wide drive. We used to be paid the vast sum of a penny a bag and they were turned into rosehip syrup which after the war was a vital source of vitamin C. Rosehips are having a bit of a revival and a study review has concluded that they could be more effective than painkillers at easing the pain of arthritis sufferers. Apparently when made into a powder, the wild variety of rosehip, Rosa canina, was almost three times more effective than standard paracetamol at reducing pain in patients than paracetamol. It was also almost 40 per cent more effective than another common therapy, the drug glucosamine.

You should find it in supplement form in good health stores or there is an organic form available online at: www.little-green-nursery.co.uk.

Progesterone For Head Injuries?

I am very familiar with this natural hormone being used to treat osteoporosis and alleviate menopause symptoms, but Guomin Xiao, M.D., of Zhejiang University, has been doing a trial on treating head injury patients with injections of progesterone.

What was found was that less-severely brain-injured patients had almost a 50 per cent better chance of survival and better function after six months of treatment. Progesterone appeared to have little or no other effect during the acute phase but the main effect was seen during the recovery period after the patient had been discharged.

Although interesting, this was only a small study of 153 patients and further research is needed. However, certainly one of the benefits of progesterone as I have seen it used is to help alleviate depression, so it makes sense to see it extended to other brain function issues. Other medical research has previously found that the hormone aids in neuronal development and protects brain function in animal experiments.

Please Note: Natural progesterone is not available in the UK without a prescription as it is regulated as a natural medicine, although it is perfectly legal to buy it outside the UK and import it for your own use. Anyone wanting further information on how to obtain natural progesterone can contact us.

Belly laughs and blood pressure

When I was a child a day trip to Blackpool was a highlight of the summer holidays and my favourite thing was to go to the funfair and stand in front of an enormous machine called the Laughing Policeman.

You put your penny in the slot (it was a long time ago), and the large animated figure would rock back and forth consumed by laughter.

It was contagious: you couldn’t stand there, or be within six feet of it, without joining in. Evidently that was my first experience of knowing just what was good for me, and the foundation of my later career as a health writer! Now it seems that the Laughing Policeman’s inventor was a man who knew not just how to make people feel good, but was also unwittingly helping them lower their blood pressure too. Now a wonderful piece of research from India has shown that when 200 workers at an IT call-centre in Mumbai, India, were given 20-minute laugh-yoga sessions they had significant reductions in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure. I imagine that working in any call centre must be very stressful, and so this could be an ideal – and economic – way to increase the health of the workers. The study was reported by Dr Madan Kataria to the American Society of Hypertension and if you want to emulate it, then the laughter therapy involved breathing exercises along with laughter that starts as a gentle “hee, hee, hee” and builds to a raucous “ha, ha, ha.” Apparently it’s the full out belly laugh that really makes the difference. I can hear the voice of the Laughing Policeman echoing across the years in full agreement.

Of course you could always call in an expert, and I happen to know one. Anne McDonald actually follows the work of Dr Kataria and is based a little bit nearer to us in Dublin. She is a qualified ‘laughologist’ if you need one in your place of work and I can highly recommend her, though you may have a stitch in your side for several hours afterwards from being overcome by a strong case of hysterics. If you want to contact her, visit her website at www.mcdonaldcoaching.com for a wealth of delights, including her own artwork.

Could diabetics and others benefit from grape skins?

A recently published paper in the science journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism has reported on new research carried out by scientists at the Peninsula Medical School in the South West of England, which has found that resveratrol, a compound present naturally in grape skin, can protect against the cellular damage to blood vessels caused by high production of glucose in diabetes.

Patients with diabetes have elevated levels of glucose that circulate in the blood and which cause both micro- and macro- vascular complications by damaging the mitochondria. These are the tiny power plants within cells responsible for generating energy and when they are damaged they can leak electrons and make highly damaging ‘free radicals’. Serious complications can arise when this happens, including kidney disease, heart disease and retinopathy – which if left untreated can lead to blindness.

Resveratrol stops the damage by helping cells make protective enzymes to prevent the leakage of electrons and the production of the toxic ‘free radicals’. By including grapes in your diet, and other sources such as seeds, peanuts and red wine you could be helping prevent vascular damage caused by hyperglycemia in the future.

Other Health Benefits

You know how you take grapes to patients in hospitals? Well if you take them red grapes the resveratrol in the skin has also been shown to help with other health issues. For instance, if you have the flu, then resveratrol has been shown to prevent the continued reproduction of the flu virus if taken within six hours of the first infection. It has been shown to be anticarcinogenic, and there is also growing evidence that it can also protect the heart. It does this in several ways: inhibits platelet aggregation, the proliferation of smooth-muscle cells, and the oxidation of LDL-cholesterol. So don’t ask ‘Beulah, peel me a grape’, as Mae West famously said, but insist she keeps the skins on!

A chocolate a day keeps womens heart attacks away?

The University of East Anglia is conducting a study on the health benefits of chocolate, specifically relating to risk of heart disease in women. In the first clinical trial of its kind, the researchers at UEA will be asking postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes to eat a specially formulated chocolate bar which has been developed with the help of a Belgian chocolatier for this study. It will provide a higher dose of the protective compounds in cocoa than found in standard chocolate and to maximise the potential benefits, soy has also been added. Soy is another great source of flavonoids, which have been shown to benefit the heart-health of women. This is particularly important for women over 50, because the hormonal changes at that time means that deaths due to heart disease increase rapidly after the menopause, and having type 2 diabetes increases this risk by a further three-and-a-half times.

According to Professor Aedin Cassidy, the lead researcher and Professor of Diet and Health at UEA, “Despite postmenopausal women being at a similar risk to men for developing cardiovascular disease, to date they are under-represented in clinical trials. We hope to show that adding flavonoids to their diets will provide additional protection from heart disease and give women the opportunity to take more control over reducing their risk of heart disease in the future.” Funded by Diabetes UK, I would have thought the health benefits of chocolate had been thoroughly explored, certainly by me on a regular basis, but if any of you are still in doubt: per ounce, chocolate has more antioxidants than fruit, vegetables, tea or wine, with dark chocolate having twice the antioxidants of milk chocolate but you will get the most benefit, as usual, from eating organic. Looks like sales of Green & Black’s organic chocolate bars is set to rise!

Interested in taking part? The researchers at UEA are recruiting 150 women under the age of 70 who have type 2 diabetes and have not had a period for at least one year (and are not taking HRT). If you fit the profile you will also need to have been prescribed cholesterol lowering drugs (statins) for at least one year. To find out more, or to volunteer, please telephone 01603 288570 and ask for Andrea Brown (study nurse) or Dr Peter Curtis (study co-ordinator) or email [email protected].

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