Choosing Fruit and Vegetable Juicers

Many people do not get the vitamins that they need daily. While it is easy to take a vitamin most people forget and it is extremely difficult to make sure that we eat the needed nutrition each day. Eating fruits and vegetables every single day can give us the vitamins and nutrients that we need as well as energy and many other added benefits. There are even some studies that link eating fruits and vegetables daily with a lower cancer risk. Most people simply do not have the time for this and go throughout their lives without eating these essential foods, but there is definitely a better way.

-Adding Fruit and Vegetable Juicers

Instead of eating the fruits and vegetables every single day you can drink vegetable or fruit juice. While there are many companies that offer this type of juice drink premixed and ready in the bottle there are so many additives that are added in that we simply do not get as good a nutritional value as we would if we made the juice ourselves. This is why we need to make our own juice with the help of juicers that specialize in this food group.

-What Are Fruit and Vegetable Juicers

These juicers are a broad variety of different juicers made specifically to extract the juice out of a fruit or vegetable. This can be done in several methods and usually involves squeezing or grinding the vegetable and/or fruit until all the juice is out. This results in only the pulp remaining of the fruit and is a great way to get natural and great tasting juice to consume that you do not have to worry about any kind of preservatives or artificial sweeteners being added to.

-Where to Find These Types of Juicers

If you want to purchase these types of juicers there are several different locations where you can purchase from. The first being online and this is one of the most popular places to purchase from. If you purchase your juicers online you will get a chance to read reviews and go through several different models and types of juicers until you find the correct juicer for you. If you do not find what you are looking for online or you do not feel comfortable with purchasing online you can go to one of your local stores and look for a great juicer there.

The Natural Cure for Crohns and Celiacs Disease

There are a great number of diets out there to help us shed a few pounds, but for some their choice in diet has a direct correlation to their health and can even save their life.

For sufferers of chronic diseases like Crohns Disease, Celiac Disease, and IBS switching to the SCD Diet (also commonly referred to as the Specific Carbohydrate Diet) can greatly improve their quality of life. Made famous in the book “Breaking the Viscous Cycle” the SCD Diet has been around for decades but is just now being (re?)-discovered by millions suffering from these chronic diseases and the results are undeniable – For those with patience and who are committed to the diet it really works!

These diseases are often caused by reactions to specific types of food. Processed sugars and gluten are two of the more common foods that can trigger a reaction in the disease sufferers body. This reaction causes that person to overproduce bacteria which ultimately leads to symptoms related to their disorder. For sufferers of these diseases, these trigger food are a true food allergy and should be avoided at all costs.

The SCD Diet works by eliminating these trigger foods from your diet. Such trigger foods are foods that contain sugar, wheat (gluten) and dairy products as well as certain chemicals and other processed ingredients. While this does limit the selection of food people on the diet can eat, its greatly reduces or even eliminated symptoms. Several individuals are able to switch back to their old diet after following the SCD Diet for a few years and letting their body heal, though few ever leave the diet once becoming healthy.

There is a very active and supportive community of people on this diet and their collective creativity has resulted in countless tasty recipe’s including special yogurts and ice creams compatible with the diet! As a matter of fact, with the resources available on the web and the countless recipe books produced for the diet you may have an easier time than ever getting started with your new diet.

The important thing is to commit to the diet. Going on and off it doesn’t do any good and you’ll simply relapse because you haven’t given your body a chance to heal from the foods that have been causing your symptoms.

For anyone looking to get started on this diet, you don’t need to go it alone. There are many great SCD resources on the web including recipes and support groups so check around and you may find all the support you need to rid yourself of these painful symptoms once and for all!

Five Things You Need to Know About HIPAA

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act – better known as HIPAA – went into effect in 1996. HIPAA does a number of things including helping workers keep health insurance coverage whenever they lose or change a job. One of the most important aspects of HIPAA, however, deals with privacy…and it has an impact on everyone.

HIPAA – for the first time – created a set of privacy rules which dictate how, what, where, when and with whom any personal health information can be shared. Essentially, HIPAA established a set of guidelines to minimize the chance that your personal medical information will be disclosed to someone who shouldn’t see it.

Recent years have seen tremendous developments in medicine such as the ability for doctors to email x-rays to specialists for a second opinion in mere seconds. With those advances, however, personal medical information has become more at risk of disclosure. HIPAA established federal protections for protected health information (what’s known as ‘PHI’)… whether it’s a physical paper record in a doctor’s office or an electronic file at an HMO.

Here are 5 important things to know about HIPAA and privacy:

1. HIPAA protects your personal information.
Personally identifiable health information, such as a person’s name, important dates (their birth date, admission or discharge date), phone number, social security number, photographs, and even geographic identifiers such as city, zip code or state are protected.

2. HIPAA gives patients more control over their personal information.
HIPAA grants patients some control over the use of their health information, and with whom it can be shared. HIPAA gives patients personal rights, including: required privacy notices that explain how protected information will be used and shared, the ability to request that protected information be subject to restricted rules of disclosure, and the right to inspect, copy or amend one’s medical records.

3. HIPAA doesn’t impact the quality of medical care.
HIPAA was first implemented many years ago, and most people haven’t even really noticed it. Many patients remember having signed privacy notices at the doctor’s office, but aside from that the changes since HIPAA’s privacy rule went into effect have been mostly behind the scenes and have nothing to do with the delivery or quality of medical care.

4. Many organizations are required to follow the HIPAA privacy rules.
Beyond a patient’s primary care physician is a wide array of companies and organizations that are required to adhere to HIPAA’s regulations, and they are referred to as ‘covered entities.’ They include: most doctors, dentists and chiropractors, Medicare and Medicaid health insurance companies and HMOs, Health Care Clearinghouses, clinics, hospitals, senior living facilities, psychologists, and pharmacies.

5. Many organizations are exceptions to the HIPAA regulations.
Many people are unaware that there are organizations that might have access to personal health information who are not obligated to adhere to HIPAA. These include: employers, life insurance and workers compensation insurers, state offices, municipal offices and school districts, including law enforcement agencies. While most employers adhere to HIPAA’s guidelines, it is critical to understand there are exceptions.

How to Diet Food Review – Brown Rice

If you are interested in dieting, you may have heard talk of how to diet. I can almost guarantee you haven’t heard everything though. In fact, if you read the rest of this how to diet review, you’ll discover three features almost nobody is talking about… yet…

Fiber

Fiber works by shortening the amount of time cancerous toxins stay in the colon, thereby reducing the chance of colon cancer. One cup of brown rice supplies fourteen percent of your daily need of fiber. Selenium also works at reducing the risk of getting colon cancer. One cup of brown rice provides more than twenty five percent of daily intake of selenium. This mineral most average Americans do not get in their diets. This mineral repairs DNA and helps to regularize the division of cells. It also encourages apoptosis, this is where a cell destroys itself if it used up or abnormal. Testing indicated that the there is a very strong correlation between the level of selenium in a diet and the odds of getting cancer. Selenium also helps to reactivate certain proteins which, when inactivated, allow toxins to damage DNA.

Comparison with White Rice

In terms of carbohydrates and calories, there is not much difference between white rice and brown rice. The real difference is the nutrient content and the level of industrial processing. Brown rice is created when the husk of the rice grain is removed. White rice is produced when not only the husk is removed, but also the bran and the germ. Many vitamins and minerals are removed via this act of industrialization. However some B vitamins are recovered due to FDA requirements. One cup of brown rice contains eighty four milligrams of magnesium while white rice contains only nineteen milligrams. Oils, fatty acids and fiber are also removed from white rice.

The B Vitamins

Vitamin B1, thiamine, is responsible for converting common carbohydrates into glucose. Although lack of this vitamin is rare, it can be found in alcoholics, and whatever the negative effects produced can be cured with more of the vitamin. Vitamin B2, riboflavin, helps to break apart proteins, fats and, like thiamine, carbohydrates. Deficits of this vitamin can result in skin and soft tissue damage. Vitamin B3, niacin, is required for processing food, helping the digestive system, preserving the nerves and keeping your skin healthy. Lack of niacin, in the times before, had been associated with the impoverished and led to mental illness.

There Are No Such Things As “Bad Foods”

Don’t eat this! That’s bad for you! How many times have you heard stuff like that? Don’t eat this, don’t eat that, stay away from this, and cut out that, etc., etc. It could get a bit frustrating at times, doesn’t it.

I was actually listening to someone giving a weekly talk about nutrition. What he has to say is usually valid, except that he could take it to the extremes. One night, he was talking about Vitamin Water, and how the water is fine — except that it has sugar! Oh my! When two ladies walked into the session late and saw the Vitamin Water sitting on a table, they were joking amongst themselves, “I bet he says that it would make you gain 8 pounds!”

Yes, they were joking, but he has a reputation of saying that there are foods out there that you should just stay away from, because they are “junk.” You don’t want to put all this “junk” in your body. He has even taken it to the level where you really shouldn’t eat anything that has a nutrition label. Fruits, veggies, and whole meat don’t have nutrition labels. Cereals, breads, etc., all have nutrition labels. Why should you eat something that has been packaged and tampered with?

But he’s not the only one who could take his views to the extreme. Others are just like him teaching that there are foods you need to stay away from. And even for me, it could become frustrating because simply put, if the food doesn’t do anything for the body, then don’t eat it.

My take on this view is that there are really no bad foods. Now, there are foods with some bad stuff in it, but the food overall isn’t bad.

Think about it this way. ALL foods come from nature, everything from candy to the food from McDonald’s. Everything is natural, and everything has at least ONE ingredient that the body could use. And all foods have at least one of the following essential ingredients: carbs, fats, protein, vitamins, minerals, and water.

Lollipops are liquidized sugar. Our bodies need the sugar. Meat has protein. We need protein. French fries has fat. Our bodies need fat. All foods have something that the body could use.

The problem with our health has little to do with what we eat as it does with how much of it we do eat. Eating only French fries would mess you up. But eating only carrots would do the same thing. Too much fat is just as bad has having too much of one vitamin. Both lead to health problems.

So, taking this into consideration, would eating a Snickers bar really hurt you? Does it have nothing that the body could use? It has sugar, fat, and protein. Yes, it has a lot of sugar and a lot of fat, but would it hurt to eat it once a day? Probably not if your overall diet for the day was good. Would eating a deep-fried butter ball from a state fair kill you? No, the body could use the fat and sugar from it, and if your overall diet is good, it won’t harm you.

What if you ate something that has bad stuff added, such as artificial dyes and preservatives? This is where we need to recognize how complex your body is. It’s able to filter out toxins (and toxins are anything that the body can’t use). Now, everybody is not going to agree on how well the body could filter out these toxins, but if you’re overloading your body with the bad stuff, it could do well in getting rid of whatever it doesn’t need.

Think about this. What’s the point of always trying to sanitize your hands if they are going to keep getting dirty?You wash your hands after you’ve used the bathroom and immediately turn the water off — and the handle has germs! After washing your hands, you literally just picked up germs again. And then you grab a paper towel. More germs. You opened the door of the bathroom by touching the handle, then you rub your hair, drink from the water fountain, etc., etc. Your hands are full of germs again. But the good news is that your body has an immune system to cover this problem so that you don’t have to stress over keeping yourself germ free.

Same thing with food. The body could filter out what it doesn’t need through the liver and kidneys. As long as you’re not overloading the body with toxins, your body is good to go. Enjoy that non-organic cheesecake!

Now, I’m BIG on organic foods and limiting the “junk.” However, I also don’t advocate avoiding the foods that you love. What I am saying is what most health experts would suggest: do everything in moderation. Vitamin Water with sugar is not a problem. A Snickers bar is not the problem. Your HABITS are the problem. Your body suffers because of your bad decisions, not because you ate a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

Sex Is Healthy For Your Prostate

Since many of my male patients are over the age of 40, there comes a time when I, as their doctor, have to have “the talk” with them. Most of my male patients had a similar talk with their fathers, or a significant elder, when they were adolescents about the “birds and bees” and how sexual activity pertains to maturing and developing healthy, intimate relationships.

It may surprise you to know that I also talk to my male patients about the importance of sexual activity but from a much different perspective – one that can save their life by keeping their prostate healthy. You read that right – regular sexual activity can keep your prostate, and the rest of you, healthy well into your old age. Let me explain how.

Seminal Fluid and Your Prostate

As a doctor, I recommend regular prostate screening to my male patients over 40. This includes getting a physical prostate exam and blood work to determine their PSA, prostate specific antigen, levels to be sure they are not developing prostate disease.

At this examination time, I also like to talk to my male patients about recent studies cited in the British Journal of Urology that have shown that regular clearing of seminal fluid from the prostate through ejaculation can help prevent prostate cancer.

Many urologists believe that they see a direct cause and effect between how often a man ejaculates and his development of prostate cancer. Indeed, when my own father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the first question his urologist asked him was how often do you have sex? Since my mother had died years before, and my father had not re-established another relationship, his level of regular sexual activity had dropped to zero.

As I explain to my patients, the prostate gland is responsible for producing seminal fluid, the fluid that carries their sperm. The prostate draws zinc, potassium and citric acid from the general blood supply and then concentrates it about 600 times. Researchers speculate that likely any carcinogens that are in the blood are also drawn into the prostate along with the other elements it uses to create seminal fluid. Without regular ejaculation, the amount, and length of time seminal fluid stays, in the prostate can become a risk to your health. According to the urologists theory, your chances of prostate cancer increase.

However, if you’re a man who does not ejaculate regularly, these fluids build up in your prostate and the prostate is then constantly immersed in stagnant, cancer-promoting fluids.

What’s A Guy To Do?

When I have this discussion about prostate health and sexual activity with my patients, many of them confide that they do not have a regular sexual relationship with a significant other. Some of them are divorced, some are widowers, and some are just single and casually dating occasionally without sexual intercourse involved.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating that anyone start engaging in risky, promiscuous sexual activity just to keep their prostate healthy! Rather, as I tell my patients, if you don’t have a regular sexual relationship with a significant other, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with engaging in masturbation once or twice a week until you develop a loving, intimate relationship with someone. In fact, it’s actually good for other aspects of your health as well. It can decrease stress, help you sleep, and lower your blood pressure.

How Much Sexual Activity Is Good?

As I also counsel my patients, don’t get into the thinking that if a little sexual activity is good for your prostate, more and more sexual activity will be even better for it. Not true. In fact, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine that focuses on all processes in the physical body being in balance, your sexual activity and release of seminal fluid need to be balanced as well.

Too frequent ejaculation can lead to what urologists call “nonspecific prostatitis”, or inflammation of the prostate, as inflammation has been proven recently as setting the stage for disease to set in. So how much ejaculation is beneficial? Here’s a general guideline for men over 30:

1. 30-40: 3-4 times a week.
2. 40-50: 1-2 times a week.
3. 50-60: At least once a week.
4. 60′s and over: At least once every few weeks.

Trouble Ejaculating? Try Exercise and Nutrition

Exercise is always beneficial to a man’s sexual health as it helps him keep his weight normal. Obesity is one of the frequent causes of ejaculation problems due to lowering of testosterone. Regular, aerobic activity 3-4 times a week coupled with some weight training 2-3 times a week can do a lot to keep your weight normal and your hormone levels stable. In addition, it helps to keep blood and lymph circulating in the lower part of a man’s body.

Your prostate diet may also be to blame for poor testosterone production and the ability to ejaculate properly. Make sure your diet includes enough zinc, protein and vitamin C, the very building blocks of testosterone and seminal fluid. In addition, watch for xenoestrogens (environmental estrogen) in your diet from microwaveable foods packaged in plastics and/or through drinking water and/or sodas in plastic bottles that may have become heated and released bisphenol A.

As I tell my patients, protecting your prostate health through regular ejaculation, whether it’s through sexual activity in a shared relationship, or your own personal privacy, is a completely natural and health promoting thing to do. It’s all about keeping your body in natural balance!

Keep Your Children Healthy Using Common Sense

If your goal is to have healthy kids in your family, most people do not realize that common sense is your most useful approach in trying to do this the proper way. The lives of our children are surrounded by fast food and cell phones, things that keep them from being as active as they should be; as parents, we need to show them the benefits of exercising and eating right. In the paragraphs that follow, we will show you several ways that you can help your kids become satisfied and healthier.

As smoking is very bad and everyone knows the perils of it, you should make your child aware of this and convince them not to smoke. But you can do more than this. For one thing, if you’re a smoker, you’d be doing your kids as well as yourself a favor if you quit. It is dangerous to be a smoker and almost as bad to have second hand smoke. So you’ll want to naturally keep your child away from smoke. Aside from this, setting the right example is immensely important. If your kids see you smoking, this will make more of an impression on them than any words you say. You could also have a no smoking policy in the house that applies to guests as well as family members to keep the house free of second hand smoke.

You should take your children for regular check-ups with a doctor that you know and trust. Your pediatrician should know which vaccinations are necessary as well as noticing any issues or problems that need addressing. It is important to treat your child with the right medicine if they get a minor health problem like a cold, fever or ear infection. It is best to keep your child away from others if he or she is ill and keep ill people away from them.

For both kids and adults, dental health is an important part of a healthy body. Be certain that your kids understand how important it is for them to brush their teeth twice a day. Make dental appointments for them on a constant basis. Acknowledge the advice that the dentist gives. Also watch that they don’t eat too many sweets that can be harmful to the teeth, including chewing gum. Childhood is the best period to start protecting your gums and teeth. This can hinder dental problems from becoming an issue later on in life. Keeping healthy kids is not a hard thing to manage.

The Perfect Zig Zag Diet for Weight Loss

Calorie limitation will take you a long way.

However it will only take you so far. Once you get to a certain stage, the body begins taking steps to avoid fat reduction and encourage fat storage as this is what it really thinks will enable you to survive. Your body can’t really know the difference between a calorie restricted diet and starvation other than the former is simply a milder variety of the latter. This is the reason why the slimmer you get, the more difficult it becomes to get rid of fat. You can create a significant calorie deficit by eating very low-calorie and low-carb for a few days, but go any further than that and you are going to come to a fat burning brick wall. Your system will trump all of your work by bringing down levels of fat loss hormones and increasing levels of fat storing hormones. On the other hand, a zig zag diet plan helps keep your fat burning hormones running sound.

The key hormone that controls all of the others is leptin.

Excessive leptin levels are linked to excessive body fat amounts and a higher calorie consumption, which allow you to burn fat more readily. Low leptin amounts are connected with lower body fat amounts and calorie restriction which makes it more challenging for you to burn fat. That’s pretty much all you have to understand without getting too scientific. If you wish to get ultra lean and shed fat faster than an average person on a diet, you must outsmart your body and make best use of its fat burning potential, even when it doesn’t want to do so.

That’s where a zig zag diet regime (often called calorie cycling) is important.

So we recognize that in order to shed fat, we must produce a calorie deficit, which implies consuming less. But simultaneously, as we make this happen, it makes it harder to lose fat because the body is taking measures against it. So what’s the remedy? Restrict calories for several days to burn as much fat as possible while your leptin amounts are ample. And then, after they start to decrease, employ a cheat day and reset your leptin amounts. This works like a dream because it will take several days of calorie restriction for your leptin amounts to lower substantially, but only a day of overeating to reset them.

So let’s get this straight… gorging once every several days is actually beneficial for fat burning?

Absolutely. In fact, the most effective foods to cheat with are also the worst foods for you: high carb and high fat foods lift leptin levels more than all other types of food. But you must do it properly. Don’t play the leptin card and employ it as an excuse to have numerous cheat days weekly. This will blow up in your face and also in your gut. A cheat day every few days is okay and will actually work in your favor if you’re putting in the work on the non-cheat days and doing what you’re supposed to. I’ve known about the wonder of cheating for a while and I’ve been employing cheat days routinely, but I was making a couple of major blunders.

The first error was enjoying back-to-back cheat days.

I used to do this often on either Friday and Saturday or Saturday and Sunday. I thought I had been sensible almost all week, so I could enjoy all weekend. The problem with this was that after my first cheat day, my glycogen stores were maxed from my carb binge. So when I had my next cheat day shortly after, the subsequent carb binge would go instantly to fat storage. I was still dropping enough fat on my non cheat days to generate a net fat loss for the week, but I would’ve dropped more fat by deliberately spreading out my cheat days. Now, I have a mild cheat day mid-week and a full out cheat day on the weekend. The added advantage of following a cheat day with a fasting day or extremely low-calorie day is that your body burns more fat on the low-calorie day since leptin amounts are restored.

The second mistake was less active cheat days.

Obviously, when you are taking in more food energy than you’re getting rid of, you’re bound to store some of it as fat. You might gain a little bit of fat over these cheat days. But on your non-cheat days, there’s a high probability you’ll lose more fat for a weekly net fat loss. This is exactly what you’re shooting for. But suppose there was a means to avoid fat gain completely during cheat days enhancing your results even more? Well there is and it’s called intense exercise. When you endure strenuous weight training or intense cardio exercise like HIIT, it reduces the glycogen stores in your muscles. Then when you eat lots of pizza or pasta, the very first thing your body wants to do is fill up those stores… meaning the cheat foods are going to your muscles instead of your fat stores. Boom!

Intense physical exercise on cheat days is money for preventing excess fat gain. Intense is the important word here. Walking around the neighborhood is okay, but it won’t work well for this. You need something that’s going to knock you out and provide your muscles a serious beating. Once I began including intense exercise on my cheat days, I felt a pump like never before during my workouts. Additionally, and I know this seems silly but it’s true, I experienced less of a full, overweight feeling in my stomach after consuming junk food because it wasn’t traveling to my gut. Just trust me on this one.

I learned all this from the cheat day expert, Joel Marion.

His latest system called Xtreme Fat Loss Diet teaches all of this in detail plus much more. There are other topics such as using supplements that I haven’t even brought up in this post. Joel has improved this system after a period of experimentation to develop a five-day cycle which may be the perfect zig zag diet for fat burning. In reality, it’s so Xtreme, that Joel himself stresses it’s not meant to be a long-term solution. But the concepts you learn from the course make it completely worth it since you can tailor them to your routine. The most impressive thing about XFLD is that it’s the first program I’ve seen that establishes a synergistic effect from fasting, cheating, and training so that when you combine all three in the correct manner, the results you obtain completely blow away anything you might accomplish from doing each one of these individually. I’ll just leave it at this. Go check it out for yourself!