Natural Way Health Blog

Do we have a killer on the loose in Ukraine?

Much of the talk in the last few months has been about a swine flu vaccines and the after effects and side effects. An area that has been ignored is the long feared possible mutation of H1N1 with another virus leading to a nightmare scenario. Just this week I’ve become aware of a potential problem in the Ukraine.

The hitherto mild symptoms associated with H1N1 may have been replaced by what appears to be a mutated virus that actually seems to be killing many people. The virus is still under examination here in the UK and I’m hopeful that the results will be made public later this week.

The sad thing is that none of the treatments currently being purchased by governments at a cost of billions of dollars are either appropriate or effective. TamiFlu and other post infection treatments are seemingly ineffective and because this may be mutated virus it is highly likely that the vaccine that has been purchased will be completely ineffective.

There are however some very simple things that we can do to improve the performance of our immune system:

• increase vitamin D. intake to something in the regional 5000
• increase the amount of biologically active sugars we are consuming
• Add foods that are named to support the immune system i.e. garlic, only leaf extract, echinacea,

Prevention must be our first port of call but when this virus hits we need to have a well regulated immune system.

http://ukraineplague.blogspot.com

Olive Oil

In the 1930s comic strip “Popeye,” Olive Oil was portrayed as a skinny weakling, a perpetual damsel in distress who couldn’t survive without her Popeye coming to the rescue. But in the health world, olive oil is no nutritional weakling.

Besides being one of the best sources to go to for a healthy dose of monounsaturated fat – a key nutrient for lowering cholesterol levels – olive oil is something of a medical marvel. It’s always been known as a healthy oil, but only recently have we come to know just what it is specifically about olive oil that makes it so darn healthy.

For starters, olive oil – particularly extra virgin olive oil – is very high in antioxidants, one in particular called DHPEA-EDA. When researchers exposed red blood cells under oxidative stress to this and other antioxidants, they found that the DHPEA-EDA provided the best “stress-alleviation,” if you will, fighting off the free radicals to a greater extent than the three other antioxidant compounds used in the study.

Writing in the journal Molecular Nutrition and Food Research, the researchers say their findings give nutritionists the first glimpse of what makes olive oil so medically marvelous. But a new study linking extra virgin olive oil to Alzheimer’s disease prevention suggests there’s even more to olive oil than meets the eye.

It’s called oleocanthal, and it’s a natural compound found in rich supply in extra virgin olive oil. Some say oleocanthal is what gives olive oil its “peppery bite,” but the only bite researchers were recently concerned with was whether it could take a bite out of Alzheimer’s disease.

The answer? You bet it can!

Writing in the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, researchers said the oleocanthal in olive oil binds to toxic proteins that clog the synapses on the hippocampus, which is the first sign of Alzheimer’s disease onset. The hippocampus is the section of the brain that’s most adversely affected by Alzheimer’s disease.

Now, this study was not clinical, but researchers believe that future studies investigating olive oil’s ties to Alzheimer’s prevention will include humans. In the meantime, if history is any guide, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if yet another study comes out pointing to yet another aspect of olive oil that makes it so medically marvelous.

It is generally recommended that people consume about two tablespoons worth of olive oil for maximum health benefit. And to reap the benefits of as many antioxidants as possible, purchase extra virgin olive oil, being sure to store it in an area that’s not well lit. A study published in New Scientist found that extra virgin olive oils lost at least 30 percent of their antioxidant content after one year of storage in a well-lit area.

Swine Flu – long term effects

At Natural Way Health we are very careful not to ‘make claims’ about what are effectively foods and herbal supplements but there are many who do make claims and the unwelcome and unjustified criticism can be quite drastic. Some dramatic things may be happening in the USA around the whole subject of the food supplement industry and although we are not seeing similar things in the UK yet – similar things have happened in Denmark only last year. Food supplements do not cure or heal swine flu but they do support a healthy immune system. However, the FDA and the WHO are inconsistent in some ways and if only they applied the same standards to the pharmaceutical industry as they are aggressively applying to the food supplement industry we might have a better healthier population. Consider:

• swine flu vaccines. We know they have had very limited testing and their efficacy over the short and long term has yet to be proven. We may look back at this time in our history and ask, with hindsight, did we really need to vaccinate all those children?
• Olive Leaf Extract or Garlic and other compounds have been used for hundreds of years to promote good immune health? Should we use them first?

One of the most effective means of maintaining a strong immune system is to eat foods raw and juicing is a great way to make eating fruit and vegetables easy.

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Swine Flu and Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria – Recipe for Disaster

In our ongoing quest to provide truthful and relevant health information here is our second update on swine flu – it makes very interesting reading and is closer to the real truth than we might like to believe. One thought we have a the moment is that no one knows the long term effects of the swine flu vaccine or the long term effects of swine flu itself.

Swine Flu Could Combine With Hospital Superbugs to Kill Thousands

The combination of H1N1 swine flu and antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria could lead to a deadly form of pneumonia that kills half the people it infects within three days, according to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Researchers analyzed two patients who had experienced bacterial pneumonia that led to blood poisoning, concluding that the culprit was community acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA), the form of MRSA that occurs outside of health care settings like hospitals and nursing homes.

“The threat from CA-MRSA in the USA/UK is very serious concern, especially if there is a flu epidemic as this could trigger a large number of cases of necrotizing pneumonia, which has a mortality rate of more than 50 percent in 72 hours,” said Richard James, of the University of Nottingham.

MRSA is already a highly lethal bacteria, because its resistance to first-line antibiotics makes it more likely to cause complications such as blood or organ infections, boils or even skin necrosis. The bacteria kills more people each year in the United States than AIDS.

CA-MRSA cases are sharply on the rise, with more and more cases being reported in settings gyms, schools and prisons.

“The concern is that this may be the start of an exponential increase as we saw with hospital MRSA infections in the 1990s,” James said. “It took the UK 13 years to get to grips with hospital-acquired MRSA infections; we are not equipped to deal with large numbers of CA-MRSA infections in the community.”

CA-MRSA appears to be particularly likely to cause pneumonia when it infects people who are recovering from a flu infection.

“Bacterial pneumonia following influenza can be very serious and in some cases fatal,” said MRSA expert Mark Enright, of Imperial College London. “CA-MRSA pneumonia is particularly dangerous due to the rapid, aggressive nature of the infection and the difficulty in providing effective chemotherapy. The emergence of pandemic influenza and increased prevalence of CA-MRSA in many countries may cause increased morbidity and mortality in infected individuals.”

Sources for this story include: www.telegraph.co.uk; news.bbc.co.uk.

by David Gutierrez, staff writer Natural News

Biomarker 1 – Benefits of good muscle and bone

A strong, toned musculature makes all sorts of wonderful contributions to your overall well-being. A high ratio of muscle to fat on the body:

• causes the metabolism to rise, meaning you can more easily burn body fat and alter your body composition even further in favour of beneficial muscle tissue.
• increases your aerobic capacity-and the health of your whole cardiovascular system-because you have more working muscles -consuming oxygen.
• triggers muscle to use more insulin, thus greatly reducing the chances you’ll ever develop diabetes.
• helps maintain higher levels of the beneficial HDL-cholesterol in your blood.

So how do you get better bones and muscles.

1. Simple exercise – walking is free but invaluable – you don’t need to join a gym and we can all do it
   • cyclic loading of bones is a key antidote to osteoporosis
   • eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables (note not cooked) for calcium
2. Simple strength training with small weights – can of beans is a good place to start
   • sit in a chair watching television and just do simple arm raises – holing the bean can and doing it slowly
   • again sitting – raise the leg horizontal and hold for a count of 5 and gently lower – repeat 10 times
   • remember it is not the size of the weights that’s important but the number of times you repeat it

Vaccines – HPV – Brain Injury – Cervarix

As you know we’ve been following 2 vaccine related threads for some weeks. One of them is the swine flu H1N1 vaccine which has yet to be tested fully and the more pressing one is the HPV Vaccine to allegedly protects against cervical cancer. We’ve seen one tragic death, not caused by the vaccine, but which probably triggered a crisis that exposed another problem (cancer in this case) and now we’ve seen what appears to be a case where Cervarix caused such severe swelling of the brain that a girl ended up in hospital with what looks like a severe brain injury.

As the cervical cancer vaccine continues to maim or kill even more teenage girls across the UK, 18-year-old Stacey Jones is the latest victim to suffer severe harm. Previously in a state of apparent health, Stacey began to suffer severe seizures and brain inflammation within days after receiving the Cervarix vaccine injection. The swelling of her brain was so severe that it cause permanent brain damage, and today Stacey Jones is an “empty shell” of a girl. Continue Reading…

Biomarker 2 – Strength

Here’s the problem:

As we age, we lose whole motor units (a measurement of muscle). In cross-sectional studies, it’s been estimated that over the 40-year span between age 30 and 70, people experience a 20 percent decrease in the number of motor units in their thigh, for example. Similar decreases are sustained in both large and small muscle groups all over our body.

Gradual muscle loss is the catalyst for a number of other age-related changes in your body. These adverse changes are . . .

• a slowdown in your metabolism
• a steady increase in body fat
• a declining aerobic capacity
• a reduced blood-sugar tolerance
• a continuing loss in bone density

So how do we prevent or reduce the loss of muscle.

• We exercise what we have – use it or lose it
• we give the body the nutrition it deserves and requires – protein, fats and oils, carbohydrates, Vitamins and Minerals
  • we either get these elements from our diets (good quality natural food) and supplement where necessary with concentrated food source supplements
• we take regular and frequent light exercise
  • walking,
  • breathing – deep cyclical breathing is hugely important and beneficial
  • mobility – exercise the joints and muscles through their full range of movement
  • control exercises – practice manual and physical tasks that require fine muscle control – knitting,
• make exercise a priority – 10 minutes walking twice a day is enough for most people to improve their health

Muscles will only strengthen if the exercise adds:

• Resistance e.g. adding more weight
• Number of repetitions with a particular weight
• Number of sets of the exercise

Again the saying Use it or lose it is just about where it is at.

Virologist’s Views Swine Flu

Virologists are scientists who study viruses — their classification, their genetics, methods of spread and their ability to cause disease. No one knows more about this virus than the virologists.

The British science magazine, The New Scientist, recently polled 60 virologists to get their opinion. These are the results of specific questions:

Question 1 – Will the Virulent Form of the Virus Materialise?

Notice here that the about half of those polled think that the virulent form of the virus may possibly appear at some stage in the future.

Question 2 What the virologists are doing personally?

Here I think the really significant detail is that over 1/3 of these experts are planning on doing nothing other than what amounts to good personal hygiene.

The message to take away is

“Don’t worry about Swine Flu, just maintain personal hygiene and eat good food”.

Arthritis – Inflammation

Every Illness involves inflammation and the mechanisms that result in it are often poorly or not understood at all. We’ve become aware of biologicallay active carbohydrates and now the spotlight has turned to lipids or fats. Is it just possible that, just as specific functional carbohydrates have particular functions, lipids or  fats could have an equally important role to play?

Well some research from the University of Missouri-Columbia has discovered that there are some biologically active lipid molecules that do have some relationship to inflammation.

According to the National Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 46 million Americans have arthritis. Many of these people take over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medications that block production of certain molecules, known as bioactive lipids, to reduce pain and swelling. Yet, the role of these lipids is not yet understood completely, and medications may have adverse side effects.

Recently, University of Missouri researchers completed the first comprehensive analysis of bioactive lipids in an inflammatory response triggered by the Lyme disease agent, Borrelia burgdorferi. This analysis could shed light on the role bioactive lipids play in inflammatory diseases.

“Many diseases, such as arthritis, cardiovascular disease and diabetes are associated with chronic inflammation,” said Charles Brown, associate professor of veterinary pathobiology in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine. “The first step in finding an effective treatment is to understand the basics of an inflammatory response, including the role of bioactive lipids. Understanding how bioactive lipids regulate the disease processes will lead to the development of drugs that have more specific targets and less adverse side effects.”

Continue Reading…

Broccoli – Saviour of The World?

The superfood is rich in a chemical that boosts a natural defence mechanism that protects arteries from disease.

Scientists say they are closer than ever to understanding just why the vegetable, already thought to protect against cancer, is so good for us.

And they believe that broccoli and other brassicas, such as cabbage and Brussels sprouts, could actually slow the progression of existing disease. The research at Imperial College London, funded by the British Heart Foundation, discovered the effect of sulforaphane, which is also present in kale, cauliflower, bok choy and rocket.

Continue Reading…