Turmeric, the Super-Spice

Turmeric is one of several spices that have come into play as important in health maintenance and disease prevention.  It's a powerful anti-inflammatory for a range of conditions as well as an antioxidant.  

Turmeric is a whole body cleanser that has been used in Indian Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years.  It's also what gives Indian curry its yellow color.  

It's hard to beat turmeric as a natural anti-inflammatory.  And more and more research is showing that inflammation is at the center of nearly all bodily diseases and malfunctions.  My brother-in-law injured his shoulder and for a long time had been unable to sleep well because it caused him so much discomfort in bed.  After about a month of taking a hefty dose of turmeric every day, he is now able to sleep through the night.  His shoulder is still healing, and he is doing physical therapy for that, but the inflammation that exacerbated the pain has greatly diminished.  

According to Catherine Ebeling, RN, BSN, and Mike Geary, Certified Nutrition Specialist (from their website truthaboutabs.com, turmeric is beneficial for infections, fevers, digestion, liver and gall bladder problems and arthritis, as well as helping to prevent heart disease and Alzheimer's Disease. It may even help to burn fat by stimulating the flow of bile in the gall bladder and helping to digest fats, improving digestion at the same time.  

Curcumin is the active ingredient in this super-spice, and is what gives turmeric its yellow-orange pigment.  Be sure you get turmeric that has at least 4 percent curcumin, as some kinds have only about 1 percent.

I buy turmeric in bulk by the pound.  My favorite source is Frontier Natural Foods.  They are one of the major suppliers of health food stores across the country, and have been doing it since the 1970s.  You can form your own co-op and join as a wholesale buyer, but you can also purchase from them as a resale customer.  

I like to buy from Frontier because not only can you get herbs that are certified organic (important if you are going to ingest them on a regular basis), but it is also much less expensive to buy herbs in bulk.  It comes in sealed, foil-wrapped bags, so the contents are always fresh-smelling and very pungently aromatic.  Their website is at http://www.frontiercoop.com.  You  can also call them for a catalog.  They offer a huge variety of products, both their own brands as well as other manufacturer's products. 

I used to buy empty gel caps and make my own capsules, but soon got tired of doing it.  So now I take about half a rounded spoonful of turmeric every morning and just wash it down with a couple of swallows of water.  It's much cheaper and easier to use that way.   Although you can buy it in many stores already in capsules,  I prefer to use the bulk powder and swallow it alone.  At least I know what I'm getting that way.  

For more information about turmeric's wonderful benefits, click here.

The Amazing Power of Vitamin C

In my last post I talked about using Vitamin C for the prevention of atherosclerosis and heart disease, based on information provided by Dr. Thomas Levy, MD,JD, a cardiologist, in his book Stop America's #1 Killer!    Dr. Levy wrote another book, Primal Panacea, that in many ways is even more eye-opening, as it covers an even broader spectrum of information regarding what Vitamin C does to maintain health.

Dr. Levy dispels many of the medical lies about Vitamin C that have become so prevalent he calls them "urban legends".  These include the idea that there are no studies or evidence that Vitamin C works, it is not safe, it is adequately supplied by a normal diet, or the idea that if it worked we would all be using it.  Dr. Levy says these are all myths perpetuated by the mainstream medical establishment.

In this book he discusses a different approach to using Vitamin C than I had previously considered: intravenous drips or injections.  The reason for using it intravenously is that to get the therapeutic benefits he describes for some of the toughest conditions, such as cancer, poisoning or acute infection, very high doses must be given.  Some of the dosages used in clinical situations he describes were as high as 50-100 grams taken intravenously.

Primal Panacea covers an almost unbelievable range of specific conditions that can be helped and often completely healed by using high-dose Vitamin C.  Dr. Levy discusses its successful use in treating things such as blood poisoning, poisonous snake bite, black widow spider bite, as well as infectious diseases and acute toxic exposures.  Some of the acute toxic exposures he describes that have been treated successfully using intravenous Vitamin C are arsenic, mercury, aluminum, radiation, paraquat, benzene, cadmium, fluoride, mushroom poisoning,  amphetamine poisoning and others.  Discussion of its use in the treatment of infectious diseases includes hepatitis, mumps, encephalitis, HIV/AIDS, herpes, tetanus, malaria and many others.


Obviously, to take Vitamin C intravenously you will need to seek out a doctor or clinic that is hip to the benefits of high-dose Vitamin C injections.  Clinics that offer IV chelation therapy are a good place to start.  IV chelation is a subject for another time, but I had used a clinic in the past that offered it, and discovered recently that they now offer intravenous Vitamin C treatments as well.  I like to go in every once in a while just to ramp up my body's detoxification and antioxidant protection.

As anyone knows who has taken a lot of Vitamin C orally, there is a limit to how much you can take without inducing nausea or diarrhea. I've actually vomited a couple of times after taking too much Vitamin C orally in too short a time.  Yet if I stay below 5 grams a day, and use the forms Dr. Levy recommends in his books, I have no problem.   

According to Dr. Levy (and hundreds of other sources), oxidative stress exerts a pathological effect wherever it's found in the body.  If not controlled it eventually results in some form of degenerative disease.  The most common are heart disease, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis and Alzheimer's Disease.  Dr. Levy goes into detailed discussions regarding each of these conditions, citing evidence that Vitamin C supplementation  can prevent, lessen and even sometimes reverse damage inflicted by these diseases.

A problem we as humans have is that unlike most other mammalian creatures, our bodies are unable to synthesize Vitamin C.  Dr. Levy states that this was discovered over 70 years ago and reported in a study that said, "The mammals most susceptible to infectious disease - man, monkey and the guinea pig - were those that were unable to synthesize Vitamin C" (Osborn T, Gear J, "Possible relation between ability to synthesize Vitamin C and reaction to tubercle bacillus" Nature 1940  145:974).

Dr. Levy discusses the best forms of Vitamin C to take orally, including liposome-encapsulated Vitamin C (most bio-available),  and one that can be found inexpensively in power form on the internet in the form of sodium ascorbate.

Why hasn't this information become mainstream if it's so beneficial?  I've believed for a long time that there is a big conflict of interest between mainstream medicine (driven by expensive procedures and high-priced pharmaceutical manufacturers), and the best interests of the public.  The reluctance of medical insurance to cover preventive and alternative therapies has made the problem worse.  The public doesn't want to pay for therapies they believe should be covered by insurance, and invasive and expensive procedures have become the norm.  Profits from sales of pharmaceutical drugs are obscenely disproportionate to any benefits they may provide.

Unfortunately, the FDA is not protecting us from the dangers of pharmaceutical drugs.  In Chapter 8 of Primal Panacea, entitled "Are Profits More Important then People?", Dr. Levy cites a study that found adverse reactions to FDA-approved drugs to be the 4th leading cause of death in the United States in 1998. If you care about your health, and the health of your loved ones, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of Dr. Levy's book, Primal Panacea, and join the growing awareness about the need to take charge of your own health.  You can order it from his website here or purchase it on Amazon.

Again, I have no affiliation with Dr. Levy or his products.  I simply found his information important and relevant the health and welfare of people in general.