Exercising Common Sense

EXERCISING COMMON SENSE

On Food

While shopping for food, practice the good habit of reading the labels. Scan to check for MSG which we all know, has undesirable effects. The telltale symptoms of the presence of MSG are joint pain, disorientation, seizures and migraine. Of course manufacturers would try to outsmart consumers and ensures their sales, so they try to hide its presence with vague technical language. MSG lurks around in ingredients like glutamic acid, natural flavors, seasonings, autolyzed yeast or modified food starch.

Consumers don’t be fooled!

On Eating

All-day snacking beats three square meals, according to study of Dr. Vladimir Vuksan, a nutrition researcher at the University of Toronto. The study revealed that people who regularly ate four or more snacks a day had a lower LDL (“bad”) cholesterol level, higher level of HDL (“good”) cholesterol and healthier body weight than their counterparts who had three square meals a day.

If the food you take in three square meals is split up into several snacks, it lowers your cholesterol level by 5%-10%, Vuskan study shows. Don’t misunderstand – a snack means nibbling on high-fiber, low-fat food (not munching on doughnuts and junk foods), which improves your cholesterol level by 30%-40%.

On Menopause

What is most natural approach on menopause? If you have already taken drugs before you read this article, you should try to go off the drugs gradually. Doing so spares you from having rebound hot flashes worse that what you had before you took the drugs, advises Dr. Christianne Northrop. She says that women should go through a wearing period of skipping one dose on the first week, two doses on the second week, and so on.

The natural way of dealing with menopause is taking black cohosh which is found to decrease the incidence of depression, vaginal dryness and hot flashes. Other supplements that may help include Siberian ginseng, ProGest cream (natural progesterone), with yam and dong quai.

To keep bones healthy, 1,000-1,500 mg. of calcium should be taken per day, plus 300-600 mg. magnesium. These will free you from getting constipation. Do our morning exercises in the sun for your vitamin D, even not for 30 minutes thrice a week. This will prevent heart disease. For your diet, eat foods rich in nutrient-dense, carbohydrates like fruits, vegetables and beans. Avoid heating oils to hot temperature, which can cause the formation of trans-fatty acids, which causes the development of heart disease.

On Health Care

Modern health care systems encourage people to be dependent on their doctors, who often neglect to educate on one’s health. the assumption is that the doctor is an authority with tremendous training (that the patient could never hope to acquire). It’s assumed that the doctor and only the doctor and only the doctor has the answers to our problems.

This is also how people using traditional healing modalities have been intimidated in their practice. This outlook has also tricked us into misunderstanding our own bodies and minds. We have turned off the systems of natural healing and support existing within our communities, which our grandparents have availed for decades. These folk remedies were common knowledge for everyone then. But since we have been raised to believe that we don’t know anything, we tend to go to the doctors, for almost any problem, because anything might be serious.

People’s confidence in knowing what is serious and what’s not to be rebuilt. First people need to recognize that it’s possible to have sound judgment in these matters. Second, they need to look for a doctor who considers it part of his job to encourage patients to develop good judgment.

It isn’t always easy to find a doctor who would encourage his patients to spend less by visiting him less, but then if you are frank, you’d see what really motivates him, or if, in fact, you’ve entrusted your life in the right hands. Try to start this conversation by saying, “I’d like to be less reliant on you and avoid unnecessary treatments and procedures, but I want to learn how to tell when something might be serious.” If your present doctor is not receptive to this, then its time to find a new one.

There is a basic rule to keep in mind. Beyond obvious serious problems like a head injury or a high fever, if any condition persist, then serious or not, something is definitely out-of-balance and you need to see someone, who knows more than you, like a doctor or a professional healthcare practitioner.

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