Eggs offer many health benefits - A Life Building Food

by Kelly Pepper & Rami Nagel

Perhaps you've skipped this breakfast gem for fear of raising your cholesterol. Free yourself from that misconception and indulge in the treasure that a good ol' egg has to offer. Three eggs per day over a 12-week period for obese participants on a carbohydrate restricted diet actually lowered the bad LDL cholesterol and raised the good HDL(1). Another study showed that two eggs per day for six weeks did not affect cholesterol levels or brachial artery endothelial function (2). Yet another study demonstrated that people eating equal to or more than 4 eggs per week had lower cholesterol levels than those eating less than or one egg per week (3).

That aside, eggs are packed with vitamins A, D, E, B2, B6, B9, iron, calcium, phosphorous, potassium and choline (4). Now, when you think choline, think brains and babies. One egg supplies 20% of the daily recommended intake of choline, and it is used as a building block for phospholipids used in all cell membranes and is particularly integral in brain and nerve health. Share with all pregnant women you know that choline from eggs is essential for proper fetal brain development and decreased neural tube defects, and it is a necessary constituent in breast milk. In addition, choline proves important in: memory function, reducing breast cancer risk, and maintaining normal homocysteine levels. It also lowers: plasma C-reactive protein, tumor necrosis factor, and interleukin 6. In fact, in one study, lack of dietary choline resulted in fatty liver, muscle damage and some organ dysfunction (5).

Lutein and zeaxanthin are the carotenoids that imbue the bright sunshine to the yolk, so think eyes and a healthy macula when the rays beam your way. Lutein levels from eggs beat both cooked spinach and lutein supplements by three times in blood serum, and 12 weeks of eating eggs increased subjects' zeaxanthin serum levels and macular pigment (6,7).

Tryptophan and tyrosine are two amino acid egg antioxidants. Tryptophan, with a little help from a carbohydrate meal, crosses the blood brain barrier and is converted to serotonin. Serotonin, a potent mood enhancer (as many anti-depressants induce elevated levels of) can be then converted in the pineal gland to melatonin, which promotes sleepiness(8). Tyrosine is a precursor to epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine and thyroid hormones all modulating your go-go, good feelings, and alertness.

Now before you go out and buy out the market, keep in mind that pasture raised, free-grazing hens produce a superior quality egg and are less prone to salmonella contamination (9). Free hens lay eggs with 3 times more vitamin E, 7 times more beta-carotene, 1/3 less cholesterol, 1/4 less saturated fat, 2/3 more vitamin A, and 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids (10).

A great bargain, eggs are easy on the wallet and packed with goodness. So, be brave, be an egghead, and see what these capsules of dense nutrition can do for you.

The Health Benefits of Raw Eggs - A Life Building Food

Raw fats from organic vegetables and healthy animals are an ideal way for many to build up health and vitality. Raw, unheated, uncooked organic eggs from a clean source are an excellent health tonic. Regularly consuming raw eggs will benefit your health as the raw egg yolk and white helps your body eliminate stored toxins. Body builder's have long known that a great way to build healthy muscle without the extra fat is to eat raw eggs regularly.

When you cook animal proteins, eggs, milk, meat, and so on, it changes the structure of the proteins. This is not to say that all cooked animal proteins are unhealthy, but that when we do not cook the animal proteins, they many times are even healthier. Consuming eggs raw means that vital enzymes and nutrients are left intact.

Eating too many egg whites can cause a biotin deficiency. Eating the yolks only, or the biotin rich yolks with the whites will prevent this problem.

I have been craving egg nog since it was a special holiday treat for me growing up. Yet all of the store-bought egg nog's, even the organic ones, are made with disease causing pasteurized milk, and also use evaporated cane juice, which is an overly heated and processed sugar.

Raw Eggs and Cholesterol

The scare about healthy cholesterol from whole foods like eggs is unfair. The amount of consumed cholesterol has nothing to do with the amount of cholesterol in the body.

Eggs contain valuable fat which helps cleanse and lubricate our internal structures. Fat and cholesterol from damaged fats, like margarine, or cheap vegetable oils, are the types of fats that lead to adverse health consequences. It is important to differentiate good fats from unhealthy fats.

Bad press about eggs is mostly sponsored by industries that want people to consume overly processed and unhealthy foods. Do not be afraid to consume high quality eggs, a product direct from nature, just because some backwards science leads you to believe that delicious and satisfying foods like eggs might cause heart disease or some other health problem.

The idea that too much animal fat and high cholesterol are dangerous to your heart and blood vessels is nothing but a myth. You can learn more about this myth at (www.ravnskov.nu/cholesterol.htm) .

A word of caution,if you are not used to drinking lots of cream or eating lots of raw eggs, be aware that lots of raw eggs and/or cream has a healing effect on the body, and sometimes they initially can cause some types of physical responses like stomach discomfort, nausea or headaches. This is not usually food poisoning, but a cleansing action within your body.

Cheers!

Raw Egg Nog Recipe

Here is a delicious raw egg nog recipe:

• 4 raw free-range organic eggs
• 2 cups raw pasture-fed milk
• 1 cup raw pasture-fed cream
• 1/8 - 1/3 cup natural sweetener (such as: unheated honey, or rapadura)
• 1 teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg

1) Separate eggs yolk and whites.

2) Blend egg yolks with sweetener and a touch of cream.

3) Separately blend egg whites until soft peaks are formed (whisk may be required). Egg whites are optional. You can also make creamy egg nog by blending the whites with a small amount of cream, this makes it less fluffy and adds a creamy texture to it.

4) Combine everything together.

About the authors

Kelly Pepper is a mother of five with a home birth on the way. An avid reader, eclectic cook, home manager, and untiring sleuth to natural living, she gathers her experience to share with children of all ages. She is currently working on a wellness book series for children ages 4-7. She and her husband own Affinity Health Professionals
www.affinityhealthprofessionals.com.


Ramiel Nagel is the internationally published author of Cure Tooth Decay and Healing Our Children. In "Cure Tooth Decay" Nagel, reveals how your teeth can heal naturally because they were never designed to decay in the first place! Now there is a natural way to take control of your dental health by changing the food that you eat. Receive 19 free lessons on how to stop cavities

"Healing Our Children" explains the true causes of disease conditions of pregnancy and childhood so that you can avoid and prevent them. It provides essential natural health programs so that mothers and their new babies can optimize their health during the times of preconception, pregnancy, lactation and early childhood. Receive a free chapter of Healing Our Children

Free health information is also available on the topics of:

A Program for preconception health based on indigenous wisdom.
The cause of disease and the end of suffering of humanity

Source: www.naturalnews.com

Beshear spares some health-related funding in harsh budget

Though Gov. Steve Beshear recommended harsh, nearly across-the-board cuts in his state budget proposal yesterday, some areas relating to health were exempt.

Though the budget for Cabinet for Health and Family Services could be cut by 8.4 percent, its social service department would actually gain $21 million in the next two years. "Cabinet officials said that would allow them to hire about 300 new workers, about one-third of them front-line social workers," reports Tom Loftus of The Courier-Journal. The child welfare department has been under fire due to its handling of children who died or nearly died from child abuse.

Beshear's budget would also spare Medicaid, a $600 billion per year health plan paid for mainly by the federal government. The proposal would add $108 million in the next two years to the state's investment in the plan, which provides health care to the poor and disabled. "That's because of projected growth in the program, which already serves about 800,000 Kentuckians," Loftus reports.

The budget also protects mental-health programs, and, for the first time, adds funding for substance-abuse treatment as part of a Medicaid benefit. (Read more)

Kentucky center helps more than 1,000 providers get electronic health records

The Kentucky Regional Extension Center has helped more than 1,000 health care providers transition to electronic health records, with specialists advising providers so they can meet the federal standards of "Meaningful Use."

"Quick access to electronic health records can make the difference in a provider's ability to treat the patient, whether it means checking a patient's cholesterol during a routine examination or identifying a medication allergy during an emergency," said Dr. Carol Steltenkamp, who directs the KY-REC and is the chief medical officer and pediatrician at UK HealthCare.

The adoption of EHRs by providers doubled from 17 percent in 2008 to 34 percent in 2011, the National Center for Health Statistics reports. As of Nov. 30, 2011, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had paid out more than $920 million in Medicare EHR incentives and $916 in Medicaid incentives, UKNow reports. The use of electronic prescribing, which allows physicians to generate, transmit and file patient prescriptions, has increased from 0.8 percent in December 2006 to 40.2 percent in September 2011, the nation's largest e-prescribing network Surescripts reports. (Read more)

Scientists deliberately remove natural compounds from grapefruits

Grapefruits, lemons, celery, and certain other fruits and vegetables contain compounds known as furanocoumarins that can cause a negative reaction when consumed along with certain medications. But rather than examine the medications to see whether or not they themselves are safe, scientists have instead focused on developing genetically hybridized grapefruit that contains little or no furanocoumarins as the solution.

Researchers from the University of Florida (UF) have successfully crossed the genes of an ordinary grapefruit with those of a pomelo, a citrus relative of the grapefruit, according toScientific American.

Since pomelos are naturally low in furanocoumarins, the resulting fruit is also low in furanocoumarins, which means patients taking the interacting medications can safely eat them.

Published in the 'Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science', the unveiling of this new hybrid grapefruit is a welcomed invention for those who have had to restrict their grapefruit consumption. After all, furanocoumarins tend to increase the potency of certain medications by up to 500 percent, which can result in serious injury or death.

But to others, the new fruit points to the complete lunacy of modern medicine, which is more focused on making nature coexist with synthetic drugs rather than the other way around. Instead of lowering the dosages of interacting medications to accommodate furanocoumarins, for example, doctors and scientists have typically advised patients to just stop eating grapefruits.

According to Dr. Ray Sahelian, coumarins are health-promoting nutrients that can provide amazing health benefits. They are said to possess anti-HIV, anti-cancer, anti-hypertension, anti-arrhythmia, and anti-osteoporosis characteristics. They can also provide natural pain relief, as well as prevent asthma and antisepsis.

Furanocoumarins are slightly different in that they are photo-reactive relatives of coumarins, but they, too, can provide health benefits. Plant oils containing furanocoumarins, though potentially harmful on healthy skin exposed to sunlight, can actually be used to naturally treat psoriasis and other skin conditions, according to Dr. Bryan Hanson in his book 'Understanding Medicinal Plants: Their Chemistry and Therapeutic Action.'

"I strongly agree that we should change the drug instead of natural food, just like you would never reshape your feet to adapt to your shoes," said one commenter at Scientific American concerning the hybridized grapefruit.

Source: www.naturalnews.com

7 Foods Experts Won’t Eat

1. GMO foods (Any of them)

The Expert: Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception and founder of Institute for Responsible Technology.

The Situation: GMO foods encourage the massive spraying of herbicides on our topsoils, polluting the ground, waterways, animals and humans. Scientific studies have shown the RoundUp Ready genes in GMO foods to transfer to our intestinal flora and the pesticide producing genes, called Bt-toxins, to be present in both unborn fetuses and their mothers. In short, GMO foods pollute our environment and out bodies. No long term health studies of GMO foods have been performed on humans. In addition to polluting our bodies with mutant DNA, eating RoundUp Ready GMO foods insures a hefty dose of herbicide given that GMO crops are even more heavily sprayed than conventional non-organic crops. The environmental, political, economic, and social damage by GMO foods is staggering. GMO foods include corn, soybeans, sugarbeets, potatoes, alfalfa, canola, potato, papaya, rice, honey, squash, rapeseed, tomatoes, sweet corn, tobacco, peas, and more in the pipeline.

The Solution: Check that all the food you purchase is non-GMO. Demand a halt to GMO foods any chance you get. Support mandatory labeling of GMO foods. Buy ORGANIC. Plant a garden

For further insights and details on the disastrous company Monsanto ( the leading company of GMO seeds), please click here

Source: GMO Foods written by WuW contributing writer Jack Adam Weber of PoeticHealing.com

2. Canned tomatoes

The Expert: Fredrick vom Saal, PhD, an endocrinologist at the University of Missouri who studies bisphenol-A.

The Situation: The resin linings of tin cans contain bisphenol-A, a synthetic estrogen that has been linked to ailments ranging from reproductive problems to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Unfortunately, acidity (a prominent characteristic of tomatoes) causes BPA to leach into your food. Studies show that the BPA in most people’s body exceeds the amount that suppresses sperm production or causes chromosomal damage to the eggs of animals. “You can get 50 mcg of BPA per liter out of a tomato can, and that’s a level that is going to impact people, particularly the young,” says vom Saal. “I won’t go near canned tomatoes.”

The Solution: Choose tomatoes in glass bottles (which do not need resin linings), such as the brands Bionaturae and Coluccio. You can also get several types in Tetra Pak boxes, like Trader Joe’s and Pomi.


3. Corn Red Beef

The Expert: Joel Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms and author of half a dozen books on sustainable farming.

The Situation: Cattle evolved to eat grass, not grains. But farmers today feed their animals corn and soybeans, which fatten up the animals faster for slaughter. More money for cattle farmers (and lower prices at the grocery store) means a lot less nutrition for us. A recent comprehensive study conducted by the USDA and researchers from Clemson University found that compared with corn-fed beef, grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E, omega-3s, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), calcium, magnesium, and potassium; lower in inflammatory omega-6s; and lower in saturated fats that have been linked to heart disease. “We need to respect the fact that cows are herbivores, and that does not mean feeding them corn and chicken manure,” says Salatin.

The Solution: Buy grass-fed beef, which can be found at specialty grocers, farmers’ markets, and nationally at Whole Foods. It’s usually labeled because it demands a premium, but if you don’t see it, ask your butcher.

4. Microwave popcorn

The Expert: Olga Naidenko, PhD, a senior scientist for the Environmental Working Group.

The Situation: Chemicals, including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), in the lining of the bag, are part of a class of compounds that may be linked to infertility in humans, according to a recent study from UCLA. In animal testing, the chemicals cause liver, testicular, and pancreatic cancer. Studies show that microwaving causes the chemicals to vaporize—and migrate into your popcorn. “They stay in your body for years and accumulate there,” says Naidenko, which is why researchers worry that levels in humans could approach the amounts causing cancers in laboratory animals. DuPont and other manufacturers have promised to phase out PFOA by 2015 under a voluntary EPA plan, but millions of bags of popcorn will be sold between now and then.

The Solution: Pop natural kernels the old-fashioned way: in a skillet. For flavorings, you can add real butter or dried seasonings, such as dillweed, vegetable flakes, or soup mix.

5. Farmed Salmon

The Expert: David Carpenter, MD, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany and publisher of a major study in the journal Science on contamination in fish.

The Situation: Nature didn’t intend for salmon to be crammed into pens and fed soy, poultry litter, and hydrolyzed chicken feathers. As a result, farmed salmon is lower in vitamin D and higher in contaminants, including carcinogens, PCBs, brominated flame retardants, and pesticides such as dioxin and DDT. According to Carpenter, the most contaminated fish come from Northern Europe, which can be found on American menus. “You can only safely eat one of these salmon dinners every 5 months without increasing your risk of cancer,” says Carpenter, whose 2004 fish contamination study got broad media attention. “It’s that bad.” Preliminary science has also linked DDT to diabetes and obesity, but some nutritionists believe the benefits of omega-3s outweigh the risks. There is also concern about the high level of antibiotics and pesticides used to treat these fish. When you eat farmed salmon, you get dosed with the same drugs and chemicals.

The Solution: Switch to wild-caught Alaska salmon. If the package says fresh Atlantic, it’s farmed. There are no commercial fisheries left for wild Atlantic salmon.

Click the below picture for a Wake Up World Only Special Offer

6. Milk produced with artificial hormones

The Expert: Rick North, project director of the Campaign for Safe Food at the Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility and former CEO of the Oregon division of the American Cancer Society.

The Situation: Milk producers treat their dairy cattle with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH or rBST, as it is also known) to boost milk production. But rBGH also increases udder infections and even pus in the milk. It also leads to higher levels of a hormone called insulin-like growth factor in milk. In people, high levels of IGF-1 may contribute to breast, prostate, and colon cancers. “When the government approved rBGH, it was thought that IGF-1 from milk would be broken down in the human digestive tract,” says North. As it turns out, the casein in milk protects most of it, according to several independent studies. “There’s not 100% proof that this is increasing cancer in humans,” admits North. “However, it’s banned in most industrialized countries.”

The Solution: Check labels for rBGH-free, rBST-free, produced without artificial hormones, or organic milk. These phrases indicate rBGH-free products.

7. Conventional apples

The Expert: Mark Kastel, former executive for agribusiness and co-director of the Cornucopia Institute, a farm-policy research group that supports organic foods.

The Situation: If fall fruits held a “most doused in pesticides contest,” apples would win. Why? They are individually grafted (descended from a single tree) so that each variety maintains its distinctive flavor. As such, apples don’t develop resistance to pests and are sprayed frequently. The industry maintains that these residues are not harmful. But Kastel counters that it’s just common sense to minimize exposure by avoiding the most doused produce, like apples. “Farm workers have higher rates of many cancers,” he says. And increasing numbers of studies are starting to link a higher body burden of pesticides (from all sources) with Parkinson’s disease.

The Solution: Buy organic apples. If you can’t afford organic, be sure to wash and peel them first.

Source: www.activistpost.com