How Much Vitamin D Should You Take?

The hot topic in nutrition these days is Vitamin D because of all the known benefits. Healthy levels of vitamin D have been shown to protect against infection, boost immunity, and prevent cancer. While we do get some vitamin D in our diets, the majority needs to be derived from supplementation or sunlight. Supplementation then, is most important in the northern latiitudes in the winter months.

The best review I have seen of achieving adequate Vitamin D status is from Dr. Mercola from Mercola.com.

Read on...

There are also several good reference reviews available below. Read reviews of the latest literature on Vitamin D and its health benefits:

Vitamin D and Cancer Prevention


Ecological Studies Of Ultraviolet B, Vitamin D And Cancer Since 2000

Vitamin D and Breast Cancer

Vitamin D: What is an adequate vitamin D level and how much supplementation is necessary?

Vitamin D and respiratory health

What Exactly is Chiropractic?

Before understanding the concept of chiropractic, you must first have a basic understanding of the spinal anatomy or the structure of your spine. Your delicate spinal cord is housed and protected by your bony spine, made up of 24 freely moveable vertebrae or bones.

Each of your vertebra has the general shape of a person’s ring. The rings are stacked one on top of another forming a vertical tunnel where your spinal cord is housed.

Your brain controls your whole body via the spinal cord. It’s like your wiring in your house. It’s all controlled by your fuse box. Pull the lever down and everything shuts down. Your spine and brain are exactly the same. Shut down the brain (no brain function) and your body literally dies.

Every function in your entire body is controlled by your brain and spinal cord including muscle function, breathing, heart function, digestion, sense of touch, immune function, etc., and these are just a few things controlled by your brain and spinal cord. That's why it's important to keep your spine healthy. Keep your spine healthy, you keep your brain healthy. When your brain and spine are healthy, you are healthy.

Your delicate spinal cord is suspended from your brain and it extends down through the tunnel formed by your vertebrae. Smaller nerves lead from the spinal cord through openings between the vertebrae. Your nerves emerge in pairs, one to the right and one to the left. There are thirty-one MAJOR pairs of spinal nerves. Each set of nerves controls a specific area of your body.

When your spinal column is in proper alignment, no bones out of place even slightly, your nerves pass unimpeded through the holes in the bones. These bones can become misaligned easily; and when they do, it causes what is called subluxations.

A subluxation is a big word that can be caused by several things in life: accidents, poor posture, repetitive movements, sports injuries, or poor work ergonomics. When a bone is slightly misaligned it puts pressure on your delicate spinal cord and the nerves coming out of it.

When there is pressure on these nerves it can cause pain to that area, and possibly muscle spasm and inflammation. Pressure on these nerves can also cut off the pressure to vital organs inside your body decreasing vital functions. So what do you do?

Sometimes misaligned bones correct themselves, but most subluxations need outside assistance for healthy correction, in the form of a specific chiropractic adjustment. A special chiropractic adjustment like the one we give you will help restore your normal function, even if you have NO SYMPTOMS. A specific Chiropractic adjustment restores normal nerve supply to all areas of your body so you can start feeling vibrant all over again.
Remember, when your nerve supply is restored to 100%,… healing time, pain, inflammation, and muscle spasms decrease. Three other important things you’ll notice a difference in rather quickly… function, strength and stability are also restored to the spine.

Aspirin: A Help Or Hazard?

With 16,500 deaths from Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin, advil, ibuprofen, etc...) and 100,000 deaths from adverse drug reactions annually in our nation we need to question the use of medications for common chronic conditions.

Even over-the-counter drugs carry significant risks. Consider HEALTHY lifestyle changes and NATURAL health care options and avoid potentially deadly medications!

"It has been estimated conservatively that 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur among patients with rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis every year in the United States. This figure is similar to the number of deaths from the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and considerably greater than the number of deaths from multiple myeloma, asthma, cervical cancer, or Hodgkin’s disease. If deaths from gastrointestinal toxic effects from NSAIDs were tabulated separately in the National Vital Statistics reports, these effects would constitute the 15th most common cause of death in the United States. Yet these toxic effects remain mainly a “silent epidemic,” with many physicians and most patients unaware of the magnitude of the problem. Furthermore the mortality statistics do not include deaths ascribed to the use of over-the-counter NSAIDS." (Wolfe M. MD, Lichtenstein D. MD, and Singh Gurkirpal, MD, “Gastrointestinal Toxicity of Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs”, The New England Journal of Medicine, June 17, 1999, Vol. 340, No. 24, pp. 1888-1889.)

Read more on this topic...
http://www.naturalnews.com/027548_swine_flu_vaccines_death_risk.html


www.lifestylechirocenter.com

Colic Anyone?

If you have a colicky baby, and other forms of treatment don't seem to be helping very much, and you’re at your wits end, you may want to investigate bringing your baby in for a checkup.

As your child is being born, the neck and back vertebrae can go out of alignment due to the stretching and compressing of the body as it emerges into the world.

If your delivery included a prolonged pushing stage, forceps or vacuum extraction, or other form of ‘assisted delivery’, the chances of a misalignment are even greater.

If the misalignments in the spine and neck, called vertebral subluxations, are big enough, the functioning of major systems in the babies’ body can be compromised.

The digestive system can be affected and ineffective digestion of breast milk can cause major discomfort in your baby, leading to ‘colic’ episodes.

Many parents are wary of taking their small, helpless babies to see a chiropractor.

The main reason being the "Snap, Crackle and Pop" stereotype that chiropractic invokes.

In actuality, the adjustments that a chiropractor will do on your baby are basically applying gently pressure with the finger to areas on the neck and back, like a small nudge on the forearm.

Here’s what you’ll probably see. You may see your baby totally relax before your eyes as the misalignments are corrected. Think of yourself. If you had a bad headache, your neck was tighter than a drum and you could hardly turn your head, wouldn’t you be a little cranky?

Your child is no different. The only real difference is he can’t tell you by speech. He has to do it by his actions.

As with selecting any health care provider, you need to ask questions first.

Chiropractic care can be very valuable in helping to calm the ‘colic’ tendencies. If you want your baby to be the best he or she can be, don’t you think it’s time you helped them, help them selves by getting them checked?


www.lifestylechirocenter.com

Fight The Flu With 4 Easy Steps

All we have been hearing for months now is the impending pandemic of H1N1. With "flu season" upon us I want to address some of the issues surrounding swine flu and begin to flesh out the fact, from the fiction. We are bombarded constantly by the antibacterial and antiviral messages on product marketing and drug ads on TV. The media and CDC say the best thing to prevent the feared flu bug is get the vaccine. Then there is nothing to worry about. But is this the whole truth? What if our bodies were designed to fight the flu naturally?

Consider this...
All schools of health thought are agreed upon this principle as sound.
Germs exist. We do not deny their presence.
We deny them as a cause of dis-ease.
If the germ theory as the causation of disease were true, there’d be no one living today to believe it; for germs have been existing for millions of years as has the man they are supposed to kill.
Germs exist. They are scavengers, refuse eaters, live upon dead waste matter.
It is a natural law that without them we would all have been dead long ago. - Dr. BJ Palmer "The Bigness of the Fellow Within"

Yes, I know that the flu virus has been analyzed, studied and researched to the nth degree. We know what it looks like, we know its mutations, we understand it has many forms and we give it various names to represent this. But should IT be our main focus as the CAUSE of sickness?

When it comes to sickness and disease, our focus is misplaced. Our nation prescribes a pill for every ill and continually looks for an "outside" method of treating our symptoms. The US makes up about 5-7% of the worlds population yet we consume 65-75% of all the world's drugs...and are getting sicker! If more medication were the answer to better health, shouldn't our rates of chronic sickness be decreasing?

Health is expressed from within a person and the BEST way to fight disease is to prevent a suitable environment for any bacterium, virus, germ, bug, or whatever you want to call it. Why is it when someone carrying the flu sneezes on two different people, one gets sick and the other one does not? What is it about one individual that prevents sickness from occurring? Is it primarily the microscopic bug that causes one to be sick, or is his/her rundown body and immune system the primary factor? That is the question we need to ask. You see, when we look at a landfill teeming with rats and flies, we don't assume that the rats and flies CAUSED the garbage to pile up and start to rot, do we? First the garbage rotted leading to a habitat for the rodents and bugs.

Our quick-fix culture would have us believe that we can live our lives the way we want to rather than follow the natural laws governing health. If sick, pop a pill or if we want to prevent sickness, get a shot. I contend that neither of these options are in the "operator's manual" for our body.

So, following are my 4 Easy Steps to Fight the Flu.
1. Get proper nutrition. Eat a balanced diet, but even a perfect diet in today's world benefits from high-quality supplementation. A bioavailable multivitamin, Omega-3 fish oil, Vitamin D, C, Zinc, probiotics are potent immune boosters. One should avoid taking iron supplements during infection, since it worsens the infection. Avoid foods that suppress immunity, such as high sugar intake and consuming foods or cooking in oils that suppress immunity and increase inflammation—such as the omega-6 oils—corn, safflower, sunflower, canola, peanut and soybean oils.

2. Get Good Rest. Nothing groundbreaking here, right? But also, avoid exhaustion and extreme exercise, both of which lower immunity and greatly increase one’s risk of serious reactions to the infection and even death. Get at least 8 hours of good sleep each night.

3. Get Adjusted. It's simple really...a properly functioning nervous system is essential for optimal immune function. Regular chiropractic care is essential for a properly functioning nervous system. Adjustments remove nerve pressure. Take the pressure and irritation away from any affected nerves and you unleash the innate power of your immune system.

4. Keep Clean. This flu is transmitted mostly by physical contact rather than by being exposed to coughing by infected individuals. You can clean commonly used surfaces, such as computer keyboards, telephone speakers, countertops and door handles with sanitizer cloths. Good hygiene is primarily responsible for the decline in infection disease over the last century and should not be ignored.

Simple lifestyle changes and steps can boost your healing ability FAR better than any pharmaceutical can. The best "doctor" in the world is your own body. Put more emphasis on the natural ability of your body and worry less about the flu bug.

"While other professions are concerned with changing environment to suit the weakened body, Chiropractic is concerned with strengthening the body to “suit” environment.
This is an explanation of the fundamental difference in theory, art, and practice between Chiropractic and other professions." - Dr. BJ Palmer "The Bigness of the Fellow Within"


www.lifestylechirocenter.com