What is the one thing you must absolutely know about supplements?

There is one essential think about food supplements that you must absolutely realize and never forget.

You know what it is?

Wait for it:

They are supplemental.

In others words, they are additional.

Would you make a big deal about them if you actually called them additionals? I wouldn’t. But that is what supplements are.

Therefore, by definition, there are no essential supplements. If they were essential, they would not be called supplements. Never mind the fact that we are being led to believe that we need to take supplements. Some are getting very rich by selling supplements.

As a friend of mine, a doctor, always says:

Americans have the most expensive urine in the world.

Because that is where most of the ingredients end up.

Now, if you have a diagnosed deficiency, for, say, iron or vitamin-D, you take supplements to treat your deficiency, under guidance of your doctor. It becomes medicine at that point. But most of us can eat much more vegetables and fruit. And those will provide the vitamins and minerals you really need.

And food will give you vitamins and minerals in a form that your body can actually absorb. When you take pills, you are taking vitamins and minerals in sterilized forms and your body did not evolve to absorb them that way.

A whole food diet is still the best way to go. Base it on vegetables and fruit and you are so much better off.

Only when you do that, and you still need something extra, go ahead and take some additionals, I mean, supplements.

Enjoy your dinner, with a loved one if possible.

Enjoy your food.

Life is good.

Joy and Purpose. If there is one secret to having a great life well into your old age, that is it.

The findings are consistent. Those who get to be really old and enjoy life to the fullest have a sense of purpose that, frankly, most of us don’t share. They know without a doubt why they are getting up in the morning, why they need to be around, what their gifts and contributions are.

Those people who live to be very old drinking red wine? I know everybody is now talking about the secret ingredient in red wine, resveratol. And there may be something to it (although we don’t know for sure yet). The real reason they live to be old, is that they live well, are social, enjoy life, and have a reason to live.

It is not the red wine that is the reason to live. You are trying to trick me. The red wine is a symptom. I bet you that these people who drink red wine until a ripe old age …

… never drink alone.

And that is the key. It is not the wine. It is the social company, the pleasure in spending time with other people, people who are happy to see you.

Their reason to live is the pleasure to share life with others.

Do you know your purpose in life?

It is not that hard to find out. There is one condition though.

Be totally honest with yourself.

And ask yourself this question:

What gives me joy?

Not satisfaction.

Not distraction.

Not pleasure (though I am all in favor of pleasure).

Joy!

Joy is are built in signal to show us what we are on earth for. It is the one sure fire pointer towards a fulfilling life.

And that is why you need to be brutally honest with yourself. Not everybody wants you to feel joy. Or rather, they don’t want you to make the kind of choices you would make if joy becomes the main purpose for living. You may stop doing things you are doing now, and that will make some people uncomfortable.

And you will anticipate their discomfort. You will think to yourself “if I really live my life with joy, I would have to stop doing xxx, and people won’t like that.” Maybe.

You have only one life, and nobody has the right to take it away from you. So decide now to find out what gives you joy. What gives you goose bumps? What thrills you? What makes you forget yourself and everything around you?

I think you already know.

What’s the answer?

Be honest.

You have a chance to love your life and live well for a long time.

Howard Thurman said it best:

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Have you ever looked at the food they serve our children in schools these days? It is an ugly site. I was shocked just by looking at a group of pictures online. This is high fat, low nutrition food. Seriously. Do an image search for “school lunch” and you will be horrified.

A recent study at the University of Michigan discovered that children who eat school lunches are more obese that children who bring their own food. Of those who ate at school, 38.8% were overweight or obese, whereas 24.4% of children who ate food that was prepared at home had this problem.

School lunches give more bad cholesterol, fewer fruits and vegetable to our children.

The Journal of the American Dietetic Association published a study in 2009 that showed that 94% of the schools do not meet the standards set by the Department of Agriculture (and between you and me, those standards are really sub-standard to begin with).

School Lunches Increase ADHD

The foods that children get in school also doubles (yes, doubles) their changes of getting ADHD.

Several experiments in the US, Great Britain and Australia have shown that providing healthy food that is based on whole grains, fruits vegetables, beans and legumes, these foods improve the grades of children. Behavioral problems go down, and truancy rates go down.

Real food may even be responsible for dropping the suicide rate down to zero (0) in one school in Wisconsin. This school, in Appleton WI. was the place where other schools sent the “difficult” children. The children with low grades, behavioral problems, mental health problems went to this place.

After five years of providing real food, instead of junk, grades went up, truancy went down, there were no incidences with gun violence, no suicides. It was a remarkable turn around. And the teachers, the teachers actually had time to teach the children. Think about that.

Food Affects all our Brains

Why should you care if you are no longer of, well, school-going age?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it?

Food has the same effects on your brain, mood and performance as it has on the brains of schoolchildren. When you eat vegetables, your mood will go up, your memory will improve, your attention span will increase, and you will be more likely to show up for your doctor’s appointments (adults are still guilty of truancy).

The effects of good food on your overall mental functioning are very well documented. You can no longer ignore it.

When it comes to food, always think of this:

What you put in your body, you put in your brain.

If you let that sink in, I think you will start to eat better. I hope so.

I would like to keep you informed of the latest information that will help you keep your mind for the rest of your life.

Please fill in this form and I will email you when I place a new article.

Thanks

Niels

Yeah.

Average Americans have not eaten more fruits and vegetables in the last ten years. Even though we have learned so much more about healthy eating and all the benefits you get from it, Americans still don’t eat enough healthy foods.

That is what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tells us in a recent report. Let me give you the highlights in, well, English.

The CDC regularly polls American about their healthy and unhealthy habits in a representative survey, which they call the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. It is an anonymous poll, so if the term “surveillance” scares you, don’t worry. This is a large survey and only six of the questions are about eating fruit and vegetables.

The good thing about this survey is that the CDC has asked these same questions every two years for the last ten years.

The number of people who eat fruit twice a day or more, was lower in 2009 than it was in 2000.

The number of people who eat vegetables at least tree times a day did not change in the same time period.

The numbers vary by state too. When it comes to fruit, the District of Columbia consumes the most per person. Oklahoma consumes the least per person.

Tennesseans eat more vegetables than anybody else and people in South Dakota eat the least.

What you have to understand is that eating fruit twice a day and vegetables three times a day, is the absolute minimum. In fact, it is not enough. And only 32.5% of Americans eat fruit twice a day, and 26.3% eat vegetables three times a day.

The CDC is modest about the claims of benefits too eating a lot of fruits and vegetables.

A diet high in fruits and vegetables can reduce the risk for many leading causes of death and can play an important role in weight management. (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, September 2010)

That is almost laughable. Can reduce the risk for many leading causes of death? It absolutely reduces your risk of getting a heart attack. There is more than 35 years worth of studies that prove that.

And can play an important role in weight management? If you base your diet on fruits and vegetables, you will loose weight. Period. I understand, the CDC is government and they cannot upset anybody.

But you and I know that we should eat mainly fruits and vegetables. In particular vegetables.

Most Americans don’t and you don’t want to be like most Americans in this respect.

If you act like most Americans, you will get sick like most Americans.

You will shorten your life like most Americans.

You know what to do.

Don’t be average.

Be healthy.

Why You Don’t Have to Be Afraid of Senior Moments.

If you are afraid of senior moments, you may mistake the genius of your brain for failure. You may sit there and wonder why you can’t think of something, but in reality, the beautiful design of your brain is helping you remember what is most important.

What do I mean?

I had dinner with a friend recently, and she told the story of a senior moment she had had a week or so ago. Now, my friend is mid-sixties, highly successful, sharp as anybody I know, working like a mad woman and she shows no signs that she even wants to stop working. She is having too much fun.

And yet, she worried about a senior moment.

Not so long before we had dinner she had a walk with a friend in the country somewhere. As they were walking they saw a tunnel under the road, a tunnel that is used to make sure that when it rains, the water drains to the other side of the road.

“Now, what is that called again? You know, there is a word for it. Those tunnels, darn, what is that word? I just can’t think of it.”

Not until my friend came home did she remember the word.

Culvert!

“That’s it. I knew it, I just couldn’t think of it. “

And she used this story to tell me that she has senior moments.

“Excuse me,” I said, “do you remember the last time in the past thirty years or so, when you actually used that word in a sentence?”

“No.”

Well, perhaps your brain isn’t loosing its strength, but it is in fact doing what it is supposed to do. That is, your brain keeps the information that you regularly use in the front, and the stuff that you are not using frequently moves to the background.

Use our brainpower for the important stuff that you are doing. Remembering the speeches you give to national audiences, remembering key information for the books and articles that you are writing. I mean, she really is a successful person.

That is how the brain works. The brain is an active organ that moves information around, depending on your use of that information.

Read that line again.

The way you use your brain determines what you will remember most easily. And information moves to the background when you are not using it.

That is a really good thing. That is what allows you to be successful. That allows you to focus on what is important to you. That allows you to focus at all. Just think what would happen if you are memorizing all the information that you have, and it would all be equally important?

You wouldn’t know to turn left or right in the morning. Everything would be of equal importance, and you couldn’t make the decision to save your life. Literally.

You are always making decisions about what is important to you, whether you are conscious of it or not.

What you think is a senior moment is really a sign that you are highly intelligent and functioning well. It shows that you are engaged and active. The old stuff moves to the background and that is where it should be, until you need it again.

So give your brain a break. Give it a moment to retrieve that information that you didn’t use for so long. It likely is still there.

And your brain will have proved once again that it was designed beautifully.

If you do nothing else to improve your health, stand. I love to watch those PBS specials that go on for two or three hours. They feature a doctor who will inform us how to improve our health. Why do we need to keep hearing the same advice though? To improve your health, you need to install healthy habits, and forming new habits takes time. Here is one suggestion where to start.

The absolute simplest and possibly the most important habit to adopt is standing. Yes, standing. Standing meditation has very old roots, and some suggest that it was practiced in pre-historic times. Standing meditation has most efficiently been formalized in Chinese Qi Gong.

I recommend watching Ken Cohen’s Qigong: Traditional Chinese Exercises for Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit for easy to follow yet in depth guidance into standing meditation. You can also read his book Way of Qigong for a detailed explanation and a deeper background. It is amazing what a simple standing exercise can do for your health. Much more than seated meditation (in my experience) standing calms the mind, energizes the entire body, creates deep awareness of your body, heals day-to-day aches and pains. But that is just my experience. For some, this practice can be life saving.

Practice Standing Meditation outside if you can, but only if there is no risk that the temperature will give you a chill. Likewise, wear something flat on your feet if there is the slightest coldness on the ground. When you practice inside, see if you can open a window.

Start by standing for 3 minutes. Is that all, you ask? Yes, if you can maintain a calm standing posture for three minutes, you are off to a great start. Increase gradually, and I do mean gradually. Eventually stand for 20 minutes. Everybody is different though. For some, 10 minutes feels good, and others stand for an hour. You will find out for yourself what a good length of time is. I practice in the morning after waking. That seems to be the best time.

How to practice standing meditation?

1. Imagine your head is suspended by a silk thread from the sky.
2. Keep your feet hip width apart. Make sure that your feet point forward. Look for it.
3. Keep your chin slightly tucked in. This will release your neck.
4. Keep your eyes open but unfocused.
5. Let your chest be sunk.
6. Drop your shoulders.
7. Keep your arms rounded in front of your chest. Imagine that you are keeping a round balloon in front of you.
8. Sink the elbows.
9. Feel your back as if it is fluid and sinking down.
10. Loosen your hip. There is a spot where your leg joins the hip on the inside. That crease is called the qua in Chinese. Feel it to be open.
11. Let the knees naturally bend.
12. Keep the weight evenly on the entire foot, both feet. You may be inclined to rest on your heals. Move forward a bit and you will find that you can relax your back more easily.
13. Breathe naturally into your belly. Don’t worry about breathing slowly so you can “be good at it.” Your breath will gradually slow down.

I have practiced standing meditation for some time. The explanation I give is from my own experience, but what I have learned I have learned mostly from Ken Cohen. I would love to hear if you practice this and what you are feeling.

Why don’t you share your experience with me?

How To Change Your Habits.

I want to offer a simple four steps solution to habit changing.

First, change one habit at a time. This is important and critical for your success in changing habits. If you try to do too many, you will fail because you will be overwhelmed by the shear number of things to keep track of all the time. You changing habits requires awareness, but to have to walk around all day as if everything is a new habit will exhaust you quickly.

You can take actually take on two habits at a time, provided they are in very different areas of your life. For instance, I think it is totally feasible to start an exercise habit for your home life and a new habit at work. You might want to get into the habit of planning tomorrow at the end of today. I am at my most productive when I start working and the plan has been made. If I start the day and still have to think about what I will do, I start with a backlog.

Second, get ready for practice. For at least 30 days you have to practice your new habit. Like an actor studying her lines, you must have your script ready with you. Oh, you didn’t write down your intention to form a new habit? Journal! Get ready to practice. This is essentially the reason you can only take on one habit at a time. Your life cannot be all practice all the time. You don’t have a script, but you can put post-it notes everywhere. Find whatever means you have to remind you. Sometimes you can put a totally nonsensical silly thing in an obvious place. Say, you have an old teddy bear. Put the bear in front of your bedroom door. Every time you walk by your door, the bear will remind you of your new habit. It sounds silly but it works. The object has to be completely strange and not be part of your normal household to work.

Three, create triggers and arrange your space to help you form your new habit. If you want to work out in the morning upon waking up, you should hang your workout clothes in our bathroom so that you will put them on after you have relieved yourself. If you got up earlier to work out and there is still someone asleep in the bedroom, you will hesitate to go back and get the clothes and your habit will fail. Have your clothes ready. Similarly, if you are always looking for your cellphone, create a landing space in your house near your front door. Put your cellphone charger there and you will always have it ready to go.

Arrange your space to support your habits. If you think you don’t have a green thumb, perhaps you should look where you put the watering can. Do you have it have stacked away underneath the sink? Do you have to move several items out of the way before you can get to the can and the plant food? No wonder you don’t have a green thumb, it is too hard to get into the habit of watering your plants. You get my drift, this applies to many areas of our lives.

Fourth and finally, be accountable. First of all, be accountable to yourself. Write down your habit, and review how you are doing on a daily basis. Perhaps that means that the first habit you have to form is to write in your journal, formulate your goals and review them routinely, daily for habit changes.

Your partner or spouse, a good friend or other family member can be a terrific source of accountability. The first important step here is that you express your intention to change a habit to someone else. Shame is a powerful motivator, so don’t choose someone who will let you get away with anything in this area. Someone who will understand too much is of no use to you right now.

Of course, a coach might be an excellent partner for you in this area.

I suspect that one of the reasons you don’t commit to habit change is the fact that you can only change one habit at a time. Perhaps you say to yourself that you have many habits that you should change. Let me reassure you that changing one habit will change many parts of your life. It has a ripple effect that is very power.

Cheri Huber wrote a great book, titled: How you do anything is how you do everything. That is a strong message. What that means for habit changing is this. The awareness you bring to changing one habit in your life will spill over into other areas of your life. You thought at one point you needed a whole series of habit changes, but you find that one change has lead to many changes already. This was not the goal initially, but a powerful unintended consequence of creating greater awareness in your life.

If you created a space near your front door where you charge your cellphone, you might find that you now also have a place for incoming and outgoing mail. You will never walk out of the house without that important folder that you need for work the next day.

If you water your plants more regularly and have created an accessible place for your watering can and plant food, you might find that you are relating to your entire house differently, because of the attention you give it. Plants don’t just need water, they need to have light and a space to thrive in. Perhaps you all of a sudden find yourself clearing away the mess that accumulated around your plants, simply after you have just watered the plants.

I used to start my day by going online and seeing what would come my way through email and rss feeds. Now that I have written down my plan for today yesterday, I start with my work immediately, because the first item on the list is not ”check email and news reader.”

So, be encouraged to change your habits and let me know how things go.

This is a wonderfully moving side of President Clinton. He saw the evidence, collected for over 25 years, and decided that he needed to eat a plant based diet to live long enough to see and enjoy his grandchildren.

Watch him:

President Clinton mentions three leading medical scientists who have proven that you can reverse heart disease. Here are their names and the books they wrote so you can learn the same lessons as President Clinton did, right from the source:

Dean Ornish wrote: The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health

Caldwell Esselstyn wrote: Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure

Colin and Thomas Campbell (father and son) wrote: The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted And the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, And Long-term Health

What you eat makes a spectacular difference in the way your brain functions. It is critical that you always remember this:

Your brain is part of your body.

What you put in your body you put in your brain.

If you eat junk you feed your brain junk.

Have you noticed that all around the country schools are rising up? They fight the junk in the school cafeterias and are getting rid of junk fast food and sodas. Instead they feed the children whole foods, vegetables, whole grains etc.

You know what happens to the children as a result?

1. Test scores go up,
2. School kids can sit still and…
3. Pay attention.

Who knew that children can sit still in school and concentrate.

I say again:

What you put into your body you put into your brain.

You have to understand that this is great news. It means that you can greatly influence your brain simply by choosing the right food.

So what is the best food for your brain?

First of all stop feeding your brain junk.

No more sugar or highly refined starches, in particular high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup is everywhere. It is a form of sugar that enters your blood stream quickly, but your brain does not register it as food. So you stay hungry while your blood sugar is going up.

Also, get rid of all food that contain transfatty acids. These artificial fats replace healthy fats in your brain. Your brain needs healthy fats, primarily omega-3 fatty acids. Transfats invade your brain and are dangerous for your brain health.

Why are these: hfcs and trans fatty acids in your food?

In two words: shelf life!

Without these food will perish, as it should. Put a slice of bread on the counter, and in a few days, mold will grow. Do the same with crackers and mold won’t grow.

Molds consider whole bread as food, but not crackers. And as it is not food to molds, nor is it food to you.

What is good food for your brain?

First, eat whole foods, concentrate on vegetables and have whole grains, brown rice, quinoa, etc. Colorful fruit berries are high in anti- oxidants. Finally, you cannot eat enough omega-3 fatty acids.

There is no need to eat salmon everyday. Let’s not overfish the salmon. Also, no farm raised fish, which contains far less of healthy fats.

Very good and cheap sources are sardines and anchovies, and if you take a supplement, take a look at krill oil. Krill is the most abundant food source in the world.

Vegetarians need to eat flax and hemp, and other nuts and seeds. You should grind the flax, and eat at least one tablespoon per day.

Walnuts are great as well.

Make sure you take sufficient vitamin b and zinc. You can find these in grass-fed beef dairy and eggs. Vegetarian options are terrific and include nuts, seeds, bean, green vegetables.

Vitamin b12 is key for vegetarians, but you knew that.

Always remember, what you put in your body you put in your brain.

Alzheimer’s Disease and Type II Diabetes are related. But How?

A recent study in Japan discovered that people who have Type II Diabetes have an extremely high chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease. The study showed that of 135 people with insulin resistance, 72% showed the kind of plaque and tangles that cause Alzheimer’s.

What they didn’t know is whether insulin resistance causes plaques to form.

In other words, the precise relationship between Alzheimer’s disease and Type II Diabetes is unclear.

In my opinion, the best changes for finding a connection is not to look for a cause-and-effect relationship between these two diseases. It is far more likely that these two have similar causes.

We know that Type II Diabetes can be prevented with good exercise and a healthy diet.

Doesn’t it make sense to assume the same for Alzheimer’s disease? It makes good sense to me, but sadly the scientific data are lacking.

There are several reasons why scientists don’t talk enough about the effects of aerobic exercise and nutrition on long term health.

1. It is extremely difficult to prove the relationship. You will have to follow a large group of people for many years, document all their physical activities and their food intake, and then hope that they show a statistically different incidence of chronic illness.
2. The other reason is that it doesn’t sell well. By that I mean, there is no drug that you can develop that can replace the effect of physical exercise and proper nutrition over years.

Are scientists primarily interested in drug development? Well, they are, and I submit, so are most people.

Face it, drugs sell like crazy. Even though science has shown that physical exercise beats anti-depressants in every controlled study, these drugs still sell like hot cakes. We like happiness in a pill and we don’t trust that we have a significant amount of control over our own lives (and perhaps we don’t want to hear that we seriously screwed up when we were eating all those frozen dinners while watching TV).

Memory and Learning Creates new Brain Cells

It has now been shown that learning and memories truly create new brain cells. Those who found this suggest that this is great news, because…

… it can lead to the development of new drugs.

Now, I don’t want to get into the specifics of biochemistry. I was struck though that these scientists thought about drugs before they thought about the good news that what we do determines whether we create new brain cells.

It is amazing news to me to learn that we grown new brain cells when we are learning stuff and are using our memories. What do you do to make your brain stronger: You go and use it. What a concept.

And you know what makes it easier to learn?

You guessed it.

Exercise.

Good food.

Walking Improves Brain Connectivity and Brain Function

It doesn’t have to involve running a marathon either.

A third study I read today showed that walking 40 minutes, three times a week, increased the connections within the brain.

This is hugely important, because no portion of the brain works in isolation. That means that the better your brain talks to itself, the better you do in everything.

There is a network in the brain called the Default Mode Network (DMN). This network is keeps your brain humming, when you are least engaged in any activity. People who have Alzheimer’s disease, show a significant lower functioning of this Default Mode Network.

Neuroplasticity

Walking just three times a week improves this network. That is what is called neuroplasticity. The brain makes new connections between the neurons (growing new neurons is called neurogenesis).

You can create neuroplasticity in your brain by walking three times a week. Everything gets better as a result. So called executive function, learning and memorizing, motor control, and…

… you feel a lot better too.

As I said, exercise beats anti-depressant medication in medical research.

Get Out the Door Already

In short:

1. Aerobic exercise helps prevent Type II Diabetes,
2. Type II Diabetes and Alzheimer’s Disease are strongly related,
3. Walking makes your brain grow more connections between the neurons, and
4. Learning stuff makes your brain grow new brain cells.

The lessons are clear:

Get out and walk.

Learn something new each day.

Have fun!

Sources:

Insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes linked to plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease

Scientists find first link in humans between memory and nerve cell production

Attention, couch potatoes! Walking boosts brain connectivity, function