You’ve done it. You’ve finally made the switch to a more healthful diet. You’re eating better, choosing more organic fruits and vegetables, but what you haven’t considered, may put you at even greater risk. How are you cooking your food?
Ditch the Teflon
Who doesn’t love Teflon? Teflon coated pots and pans work beautifully — you have to work to make something to stick to it, and clean up is a breeze. What more could you ask for? Maybe cookware that doesn’t release six toxic chemicals, including at least one carcinogen. But that’s just me — I’m picky like that.
Here’s the problem. One of the chemicals that makes teflon work — known as PFOA, or perfluorooctanoate acids, just isn’t safe. A study by the Environmental Working Group, in collaboration with Commonweal in 2005 found chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of US-born infants including PFOA. A year later, researchers at John Hopkins Hospital repeated the study, finding PFOA in umbilical cord blood in 99% of 300 newborns tested.
The study’s co-author, Lynn Goldman, MD, explains, “This study confirms that, as we might have suspected, exposure to PFOS and PFOA is fairly universal; this is of particular concern because of the potential toxicity, especially developmental toxicity, for these chemicals and the lack of information about health risks at these exposure levels.”
An EPA advisory panel has tentatively labeled PFOA a “probable” cancer-causing agent. In response, in a voluntary agreement with the EPA, eight major manufacturers have agreed to eliminate 95 percent of PFOA emissions by 2010. The hold out? They still get to use the chemical for making non-stick finishes. Some countries aren’t waiting for the manufacturers to protect their citizens — they’re considering a ban on all products with PFOA.
Even scarier, DuPont, Teflon’s maker, has a brochure about not using non-stick cookware near birds. In a word — don’t. They’ll die. Talk about a canary in the coalmine — the substance kills birds in minutes, but is completely safe for me? I’m not buying into that.
PFOA is a particular concern for a couple more reasons… it stays in the body and builds up over time, and the greatest damage is likely to be done to our smallest and most vulnerable family members — our children.
Safety tip: If you must use your Teflon cookware, the biggest danger is when the nonstick coatings are over-heated, so only cook foods at low heat. Dupont itself warns that exposure to the cookware at high heat
(approximately 500 degrees) can lead to “polymer fever,” a flu-like illness that may last several days.
Well-known brand names containing PFOA include Stainmaster, Scotchgard, SilverStone, Fluron, Supra, Excalibur, Greblon, Xylon, Duracote, Resistal, Autograph and T-Fal.
When you are ready to replace your Teflon pans with safer versions, don’t just throw them away. Consider selling them to a local metal recycling business instead. These pans are categorized as “dirty aluminum” which pays less than aluminum, but at least the material is kept out of landfills.
Aluminum Alert
Ok, you’ve ditched your Teflon, so what’s left? Almost everyone has aluminum cookware in their kitchen cupboards. It seems like a perfect choice: affordable, light-weight, and thermally responsive. But aluminum is reactive too, which means acidic foods like onions and tomatoes absorb aluminum while you cook. Heat up some tomato sauce in an aluminum pan and you can expect to serve 3-6 mg of aluminum per 100 g serving.
So what’s the problem with a little aluminum in your diet? The issue has raged for decades, but recent research continues to confirm aluminum can cause neurologic harm.
In a recent study reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology, daily aluminum intake of as little as 0.1 milligrams was associated with a greater cognitive decline over the course of the study. In fact, subjects with a high daily aluminum intake more than doubled their risk of dementia.
Safety tip: Keep aluminum cookware in good condition. The more pitted and worn out the pot, the greater the amount of aluminum will be absorbed into your food. Minimize food storage time in aluminum and avoid cooking highly acidic foods in aluminum. Also consider using a good water filter. Some areas have dangerously high levels of aluminum in everyday tap water.
Safer Cookware
Great, we’ve just emptied our cabinets of pretty much all our everyday cookware. What are we expected to cook on now? Here’s a few popular alternatives that carry less risk to your health:
Cast Iron
The original “non-stick” cookware is a well-seasoned cast iron pan. Cast iron can be used to cook at even very high temperatures, with the ability to diffuse and retain heat very well. It even has a health benefit by leaching a small amount of dietary iron into the food.
Enameled cast iron pans are also available. While they can be a little pricey, the enamel coating prevents rusting and eliminates the need for seasoning the pan.
Glass
Glass is the most inert of all cookware. In other words, it doesn’t absorb odors and flavors from foods you cook in it, and therefore doesn’t leach them back into a later dish. For that matter, it doesn’t leach anything else into your food either, good or bad. It’s a great choice, safe for all ingredients, since acidic foods won’t react in glass cookware the way they will in some metal-based pans.
Apelberg BJ, et al. Determinants of fetal exposure to polyfluoroalkyl compounds in Baltimore, Maryland. Environmental Science & Technology. 2007 Jun 1;41(11):3891-7.
Cannata JB, et al. Aluminium hydroxide intake: real risk of aluminium toxicity. British Medical Journal (Clinical research ed.). 1983 Jun 18;286(6382):1937-8.
Rondeau V, et al. Aluminum and silica in drinking water and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease or cognitive decline: findings from 15-year follow-up of the PAQUID cohort. American journal of epidemiology. 2009 Feb 15;169(4):489-96.
I know what you’re thinking… “how the heck can you cook scrambled eggs
in a blender” because that’s exactly what I thought when I saw this video:
Pretty wild, huh?
I found this video because I recently bought the Vitamix 5200 Blender and
wanted to see how others were using it. As you can tell from the video
above, this is one incredible blender. I’ve only just started using mine and
absolutely love it.
Judy, a 55-year old secretary visited her family physician after suddenly developing excruciating joint pain and lower back pain.
Her symptoms, which also included memory loss, severe dizziness and depression, had all appeared within one week’s time.
After undergoing several expensive tests with no answers, her doctor finally asked Judy to keep a food and activity journal to see if it could provide any clues. On a hunch, he asked her to stop drinking a powdered tea mix she had recently purchased to see if that helped. Amazingly, it did.
The pain was completely gone within a week of stopping use of the aspartame-containing product. To confirm the diagnosis, her doctor instructed her to begin adding aspartame back into her diet for a challenge test.
After each of three challenges, says Judy, “my whole body ached from my toes to the neck. I felt as though I had arthritis in my whole body and it hurt to move an arm or even my hand….Since that time, I have not touched anything sweetened with aspartame, and have experienced no unusual aches, joint pain, memory loss or dizziness.”
Judy’s not alone. The artificial sweetener aspartame, consumed by Americans at the rate of about 20 million pounds a year, may well be the cause behind any number of painful and life-altering conditions, including joint
pain, headaches, severe drowsiness, extreme irritability, depression, and weight gain.
How Much Is Too Much?
It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of aspartame to cause trouble. In fact, just three or four 12-ounce diet drinks per day contain enough aspartame to harm us.
Don’t drink diet soda? You don’t have to. Aspartame is found in over 6,000 processed foods – from powdered drinks, gelatin, tea, coffee, cocoa, juices, frozen desserts, to chewing gums. It’s even in vitamins (including children’s) and medications.
This means the very source of your chronic pain could be in your kitchen cabinet or refrigerator right now.
Sweet Discovery
The introduction of aspartame as a sweetener started after chemist James Schlatter accidentally tasted the new anti-ulcer drug he was developing in 1965, not realizing he had discovered a goldmine. What he discovered was a product 200 times sweeter than sugar.
By the early 70s, aspartame spread quickly to tables in restaurants, diners, and the homes of Americans under the brand names Nutrasweet, Equal, Equal-Measure and Spoonful. Aspartame gained popularity quickly because it didn’t have the aftertaste that its predecessor, saccharine did.
What is Aspartame… exactly?
Aspartame has three components: phenylalanine (50 percent), aspartic acid (40 percent) and methanol, also termed wood alcohol (10 percent). It’s classified as an excitotoxic amino acid. What that means for you is it reacts with specialized receptors in your brain in a way that causes the destruction of certain types of brain cells.
Methanol itself is a poison to your body. The EPA defines a safe consumption limit of it as 7.8 milligrams per day. The problem is a small one-liter bottle of your favorite diet beverage sweetened with aspartame contains about 56 milligrams, or eight times the EPA’s own limit, of this poison!
Remember free radicals?
If you’ve read much about health related issues at all, you’ve likely heard of free radicals. In a nutshell, these are the unstable organic molecules floating around your body which promote aging and the general breakdown of your body.
They’re implicated in many degenerative illnesses including atherosclerosis, cancer, coronary artery disease and arthritis.
Once you realize excitotoxins like aspartame help generate free radicals, not to mention direct effects such as headaches, mental confusion, and balance problems, the long list of aspartame related illnesses and disorders becomes less surprising. Of course, the effects are subtle, cumulative and develop over a prolonged period of time which is why most people don’t immediately suspect aspartame in conditions like:
Increasing severity and progression of diseases such as Alzheimer’s dementia, Parkinson’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
Cancer Risk Higher Than Thought
Independent scientists have long suspected a link between aspartame and cancer. But a few years ago, a massive study conducted at the European Ramazzini Foundation in Italy conclusively documented the direct link.
The study fed groups of rats from 8 weeks old until their natural death a feed mix laced with varying concentrations of aspartame. A significant increase in lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers were found in rats that were fed aspartame, particularly those fed daily doses equal to 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Compare this to the 50-milligram level currently deemed acceptable for humans in the United States. A year later, a second study confirmed the results.
Now what?
The best thing to do is stop using any form of aspartame immediately. While discontinuing use of aspartame can lead to the disappearance of many of the above symptoms, patients who develop full-grown tumors, diabetes, and other more serious diseases cannot usually be cured. Omitting aspartame from one’s diet, however, can sometimes potentially lessen the severity and ongoing degeneration associated with certain disorders. Exercising, improving your nutrition, and adding the appropriate supplements to reduce inflammation will also help. In other words, it’s never too late to start doing the right thing for your body.
Aspartame Alternatives
I really shouldn’t have to spell this out for you, but if you’re using any form of aspartame… stop, right now! Like Judy, you may quickly notice an improvement in pain symptoms. Or you may simply reduce the risk of dying of cancer or suffering from horrible degenerative diseases for the rest of your life. Either way, the change is worth it.
Clearly, adding a ton of sugar back into your diet isn’t great for your health, either. But if you must use sweeteners, honey, maple syrup, and even turbinado sugar (raw sugar) are all healthier alternatives to aspartame.
Another great alternative is stevia, produced from the leaves of a native South American shrub by the same name. The leaves themselves are at least 30 times sweeter than table sugar. Extracts can be ten times sweeter than the raw leaf, yet still have virtually no effect on blood glucose levels.
So, toss the aspartame-containing products you’ve been using and look for those using natural alternatives. Your body will thank you in the long run.
References
Olney JW, et al. Increasing brain tumor rates: is there a link to aspartame? Journal of neuropathology and experimental neurology. 1996 Nov;55(11):1115-23.
Roberts HJ. Aspartame as a cause of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Archives of internal medicine. 1996 May 13;156(9):1027-8.
Soffritti M, et al. First experimental demonstration of the multipotential carcinogenic effects of aspartame administered in the feed to Sprague-Dawley rats. Environmental health perspectives. 2006 Mar;114(3):379-85.
Trocho C, et al. Formaldehyde derived from dietary aspartame binds to tissue components in vivo. Life sciences. 1998;63(5):337-49.
“Drink your milk”… “it does a body good”…. “you need to get your calcium”…
You’ve heard these all before, maybe even said it to your children, family or friends… but guess what, it’s all WRONG!
Yes, wrong and more and more research is finally exposing the “Calcium Lie”…
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Listen to this special interview I did recently with Dr. Robert Thompson about the dangers and side effects of too much calcium. I think you are going to find this to be extremely informative… maybe some of it down right shocking!
This interview was just one of the many that subscribers to my monthly print newsletter “Get Healthy & Fit” received (though members get it mailed to them on CD along with the print copy of the newsletter).
Have you suffered with chronic lower back pain, sciatica, or some other form of pain for months… or even years?
Maybe it seems like you’ve already tried everything and are just about ready to give up on ever finding permanent pain relief.
Well I have good news for you: you’re not beyond help. Over the past decade we’ve helped tens of thousands of people, many in agonizing daily pain, find pain relief. People who thought there was no hope left. And today, thousands upon thousands of them remain pain free.
On the other hand, there are many others who came to us who did not find lasting relief. They continue to struggle with the same old pain year after year. Often it grows even worse.
Amazingly, in almost every case, the difference between those who found pain relief and those who did not boiled down to a willingness to follow a few simple “ground rules” for dealing with their pain. Follow these three simple rules and you will greatly improve your odds of joining those who found relief.
Rule #1: Take responsibility for ending your pain
Relief from pain is first and foremost a personal responsibility. After all, no one cares about your pain more than you do. Maybe you’re seeing a doctor, chiropractor, or any number of natural health practitioners. That’s great, but ask yourself these questions:
Has my health care provider conducted a completed head-to-toe assessment on me or only focused on the area of pain? (Pain is often referred from other areas of the body.)
If a diagnosis has been made, has it been completely explained to my understanding?
Has my health care provider identified the root cause of my pain? (Not a condition, like a herniated disc, but what actuallycaused the condition, like a specific muscle imbalance.)
Have I been given a step-by-step care plan that addresses both the pain symptoms and the underlying root cause of the identified condition?
If you haven’t received a satisfactory answer to all of these questions, ask! Don’t accept a brush off. It’s your body and you need to get the right responses to properly address your pain.
Rule #2: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
I can’t tell you how many times someone has purchased one of our products, tried it, and when their pain wasn’t 100% gone in the first day or week they decided to return the product for a refund. Look, we don’t want anyone paying for a product that doesn’t help them. And we gladly process refunds all the time. But let’s be honest here. Chances are the condition causing your pain didn’t happen overnight. Oftentimes it took years to get to the point where your back “suddenly” gave out or sciatica became noticeable.
We have a lot of testimonials on our website from people who have experienced amazing results in just days. But when you’re talking about correcting conditions that took months or years to get as bad as they are, you have to realize some people may take a little longer to work through the healing process.
So what am I saying? I’m saying that if you want to get back to a pain-free life, you might have to invest a little effort. And it
might be that one treatment only gets you part of the way there. So you have to be willing to try different approaches. For example, you
may only find some pain relief by using muscle balance therapy
to address muscle imbalances, but need to also work out trigger points to finally get the full pain relief you’re looking for.
Most importantly, don’t give up. Too many people never get pain relief simply because they give up on a treatment approach too soon. Give your body time to heal and don’t quit until you get the relief you’re looking for.
Rule #3: Stop doing what doesn’t work
Ok, now you’ve made the commitment to follow through to make progress in your fight against pain. You’re not going to quit on yourself. But here’s the other side of the coin: don’t blindly keep doing what doesn’t work.
Let’s say you’re going to a chiropractor. If you’ve been going for over three months and haven’t made any progress yet, it’s likely time to seek another approach. That’s my rule of thumb… if you’re not getting some measure of increased pain relief in three months, try something else.
If you have made progress but are still in pain, try combining multiple approaches. You might find inversion therapy gives you significant pain relief from a herniated disc, but trigger point therapy is needed to completely end referred pain while muscle balance therapy addresses what caused your disc to herniated in the first place. It’s all a process of finding what works for your body.
I hope this makes sense to you. We want to help as many people as we can live a pain free life, but ultimately, it’s up to you to make the necessary changes to improve your health.
The Healthy Back Institute - 333 Main St. Suite #201 Gaithersburg, MD 20878
Phone: 800-216-4908 Fax: 866-843-4319
The Healthy Back Institute is a Get Healthy and Fit Company
You’ve done it. You’ve finally made the switch to a more healthful diet. You’re eating better, choosing more organic fruits and vegetables, but what you haven’t considered, may put you at even greater risk. How are you cooking your food?
Judy, a 55-year old secretary visited her family physician after suddenly developing excruciating joint pain and 
“Drink your milk”… “it does a body good”…. “you need to get your calcium”…
Have you suffered with chronic 
