Tag Archives: Yeast Infection Diagnosis

Questions & Answers

How To Break Your Sugar Habit

“How can I stop eating sugary foods?” is a question I’ve been asked many times.

Sugar is extremely addictive for the brain. The brain loves sweet foods.

One of the first steps you can take to break a sugar addiction is not exposing yourself to the media that glorifies sweets. Instead, involve yourself in your own hobbies, physical activity, and healthy past times.

It’s also best to avoid sharing meals with people who eat a lot of sweets. The more friends you have that eat sweet foods, the more likely you are going to partake in all of this too. When you’re working on improving your health, spending a lot of time with junk food addicts isn’t going to help.

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I also recommend avoiding social events that include ample access to treats and sweets.
The more fresh food you eat – like vegetables, fruits, and lean meats – the less likely that you’ll crave sugary foods.

Making healthy choices for breakfast will help reduce sugar cravings. Having some protein in the morning is particularly helpful in keeping you satisfied for hours at a time. There are also hundreds of snack options that don’t involve sugar. Stock your kitchen with easy to grab, nutritious snacks like nuts, seeds, and chopped vegetables.

Over time you’ll lose your taste for sweet things. You’ll find that you no longer like the taste of pop or candy.

People don’t decide on their future. They decide on their habits. And their habits will then decide on the future of their health.

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Questions & Answers

What’s The Connection Between Stress And Food Cravings?

There’s a connection between stress, appetite, and sugar intake.

A study in 2001 took a look at this issue. The researchers exposed 59 premenopausal women to stress on one day and then had them experience a low-stress day. The caloric consumption on the stressful and non-stressful days were recorded. Some of the women had a very high cortisol spike on the stressful day. These participants were called super reactors. In contrast, there are some people who are “low reactors” to stress.

It makes the point that it’s often not the stressor that’s the biggest problem; it’s the reaction to it.

The women with the highest cortisol spikes in response to stress had the highest calorie consumption. The calories came primarily from sweet foods.

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In other words, life events can trigger physiological reactions in the body that lead to sugar cravings. People who are highly stressed often make the wrong call when it comes to food and drink choices. They reach for sweet foods. They reach for soda pop.

The take-home message is that it’s essential to not only reduce the stress in your life but also to manage how you react to that stress. It’s not possible to eliminate all stress, but you don’t have to deal with life by eating a box of donuts.

I recommend finding a way to compartmentalize your stressors, so they don’t invade all aspects of your life. Find ways to relax and keep your cortisol levels in the normal range.

High cortisol is associated with obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic diseases. It’s clearly important to ensure that you’re living a low-stress life.

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Questions & Answers

Your Gut Biome And Your Bloodstream: An Important Connection

Gut bacteria work in teams, and they influence the quality of your blood.

Gene testing allows us to see how important the microbiome is.

When I started practicing, they didn’t have gene sequencing like they had today. If they wanted to study the gut flora, they had to do it by culturing samples in Petri dishes. In some cases, the bacteria were very difficult to culture in the lab.

DNA sequencing allows for accurate identification of the wide variety of microbiomes in the gut. Genetic analysis also facilitates tracking the interaction between gut bacteria within and outside of the GI tract.

The microbiome is responsible for your digestive and overall metabolism. I believe that over time, thousands and thousands of pathways will be discovered using genetic analysis. These pathways will be the link between specific bacteria and specific diseases. I think it will be the absence of beneficial bacteria that will be most commonly associated with sickness.

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The more biodiverse a person’s gut, the more powerful and resilient they will be. People with a more narrowly defined band of gut bacteria have many more health-associated problems. This would explain why people living in the Amazon basin with 4 to 5 thousand species of bacteria in their gut have far more robust health that someone in NYC who only has one-quarter of the biome diversity.

I found it interesting to read about the powerful communication that occurs between the gut and the bloodstream. Whatever you eat, has an extremely powerful influence on your bacteria and what is happening in your blood.

When you eat crap, it negatively influences the blood. Eating healthy food improves the quality of your blood. Your blood is such a vital organ that you want to keep it in good shape all the time. You can do that by keeping your biome in good shape. That means eating the right food and having the right kind of lifestyle.

The bacteria in your gut work together in harmony to provide a robust, powerful bloodstream. Your beneficial bacteria work in teams. That’s no surprise. The best companies, businesses, and families also work in teams.

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Questions & Answers

The Health Benefits Of Spanish Black Radish

Black radish is also known as Raphanus sativus variation niger.

You may know radish as in the red kind of radish. I like to grow radishes, but I also like to grow carrots, including dark carrots. The old carrots that were grown thousands of years ago are a dark black color and even purple color, these are extremely good for your health. Today carrots are orange. I also may mention to you that carrots are orange because the Dutch bred them to be orange for the Dutch royal family, which is an orange color.

Black radish is very good for you. Black and purple pigmented vegetables, like purple lettuce, are very good for you.

Radishes taste a bit peppery. Radishes belong to the Brassica family, so they are related to kale, Brussel sprouts, broccoli, and cauliflower.

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Brassicas contain a compound called glucosinolates. In the gut, enzymes change glucosinolates into isothiocyanate. Isothiocyanate accelerates detoxification in the liver. It’s even been shown that isothiocyanate can detoxify certain cancer cell lines in the liver.

When they introduce cancer experimentally into rats or mice and then give the animals isothiocyanate, the rate of cancer is reduced. The claim isn’t that isothiocyanate cures cancer. The claim is that eating brassicas, including black radish, may help prevent cancer.

It’s also been shown that people who consume radish regularly have a much lower incidence of getting gallstones. The chemicals in radish stimulate globet cells (the mucous producing cells) and other cells in your gut that function to excrete waste. In other words, radish acts as a natural detoxifier of your small and large bowel.

Try and add more radish to your diet. Radishes are very easy to grow. They’ve got a nice crunch and are great for oral health. People who eat radishes and related vegetables tend to have sweeter breath and better digestion. Why not eat a radish instead of a chicken nugget? It’s a lot better for you.

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Questions & Answers

Why Eating Too Much Fruit Isn’t Good For Your Gut

Some patients I see eat way too much fruit. Some people eat ten pieces of fruit per day. I think that’s far too much.

Eating anything in excess is not good for the body. I’ve always maintained that consuming particular foods is fine, like vegetable consumption or meat consumption, but it should be in balance with other kinds of foods.

I’m not here to argue the different merits of diets, you know, whether you are a vegan or whether you are a paleo person. This article is about the downsides of eating too much fruit.
If you eat excessive amounts of fruit, you’re going to be overloaded with fructose. Fructose consumed in abundance can upset intestinal permeability and encourage the growth of harmful bacteria in the gut.

Some studies have shown that large amounts of fructose can cause liver damage. Further, people who eat far too much fruit tend to have lower Bacteroides levels. At the same time, proteobacteria levels tend to go up.

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The microbiome often reflects the type of food a person east. For example, Prevotella bacteria thrive in the gut when a person eats a lot of fiber, particularly vegetable fiber.

Bacteroides bacteria prefer a mixed kind of a diet, especially if there’s a bit of meat in the diet. A healthy person will have a balance of different classes of bacteria.

If a person starts overeating one particular food, the result can be a bacterial imbalance in the gut. That’s why my motto is “Everything in moderation, nothing in excess” when it comes to healthy foods.

Of course, this motto doesn’t apply to unhealthy foods like high-fructose corn syrup. Up to 60% of foods now in US supermarkets contain high-fructose corn syrup. Avoid that substance as much as you can.

I am in favor of fruit, but I’m definitely not in favor of ten pieces of fruit a day. Definitely not.

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