Natural Health Care

With intermittent fasting becoming a popular approach to losing unnecessary fat, many have asked if fasting for short periods of time is good for their health. To answer this, let's take a look at what happens in your body when you begin to ingest nothing but water for a day.

After your cells use up the sugar that's in your bloodstream from your last meal or beverage, your body has to find another source of energy for your cells. The first places that it turns to are your liver and skeletal muscles. Both your liver and muscles store sugar in the form of glycogen, and when needed, glycogen can be broken down to glucose, which all of your cells can use to produce energy for their ongoing activities. Read more

You have approximately 5 liters (about 21 cups) of blood traveling around in your blood vessels and heart at any given moment. In these 5 liters of blood, you need only about one teaspoon of sugar for all of your regular activities. If you regularly have more than a teaspoon of sugar floating through your blood vessels, the excess sugar can slow down your circulation, which, over time, can cause all of the problems you would expect to have if you had thick maple syrup clogging up your blood vessels. This is essentially what happens when a person becomes diabetic. Read more

As a society, my feeling is that we don't put enough emphasis on protecting our lungs against harmful macro and microscopic particles; this is a huge mistake, as reduced lung capacity is, in my mind, more damaging to quality of life than say, sub-optimal digestion, mild to moderate liver dysfunction, or even reduced cardiac output. If you strongly disagree with this opinion, I'm willing to bet that you'll change your mind if you spend some time in any intensive care unit and sit by a few patients who are unable to properly oxygenate their blood because of reduced lung capacity - this is a heart-wrenching scenario, one that I don't wish upon the grouchiest people I know. Read more

Contrary to popular opinion, your eyes need some exposure to the full spectrum of sunlight to be optimally healthy. Light waves from the sun are converted to electro-chemical energy in cells in your retina, and this energy is transmitted throughout your brain and body where it has positive health effects.

Energy from sunlight travels to your hypothalamus, which is an area in your brain that is about the size of a grape and acts as the micro-processing chip that governs almost everything that happens in your body. Your hypothalamus receives information from all regions of your body and uses this data to regulate your autonomic nervous system to keep you healthy. Depending on your moment-to-moment needs, your hypothalamus adjusts your heart and lung rates, the amount of blood that perfuses your skeletal muscles and digestive organs, and whether you sweat or shiver, just to name a few of the bodily activities that it controls. Read more