Washington D.C. — A U.S. Senate panel is investigating the diabetes drug,  Avandia believed the drug to have caused over 83,000 heart attacks from 1999 to 2007 alone.

A New England Journal of Medicine study found people who took the drug had a 64% increase in the risk of death from all cardiovascular causes.

Other Avandia Side Effects Include; Swollen legs or ankles; Rapid, unexplained weight gain; Tiredness; Changes in vision; Shortness of breath; Difficulty breathing; Chest pains; Dizziness and more.

The point is, this drug, once hailed as a miracle, is now revealed as a health-destroying drug, not a health-building one.  And this drug is just the latest in a LONG string of drugs that offer false hope, shatter dreams and take lives instead of saving them.

Drug Companies Not To Blame

These facts are NOT an indictment against drug companies, hundreds of thousands of people are alive today who would not be around if not for research and breakthroughs made by drug companies, and for that we all owe them a debt of gratitude.

The problem is not the drug companies, the problem is our childish, short-sighted attitude about our own health that results in millions upon millions of people developing serious diseases that could have easily been easily avoided. 

You Create Your Quality Of Health

You and with very few exceptions, you alone, determine your quality of health throughout your life.

Diabetes, heart disease and many forms of cancer are diseases of environment, and every day you exercise a great deal of control over your environment with your daily diet, nutrition and lifestyle choices.

Everyone wants to be healthy, but so many are fatigued, overweight and suffer with all manner of sniggling little health problems.  It doesn’t have to be that way… and if this describes you, I sincerely hope you decide to take responsibly and make some changes before something bad happens.  And besides that… NOTHING feels better than feeling great… and you can do just that.

More than everything else combined, your diet, nutrition and lifestyle choices determine your bodyweight, your blood pressure and cholesterol level, your energy level, immune system strength, bone density and so on. 

The $50 million secret to being healthy and strong for life is ADMIT that YOU and YOU ALONE are responsible for YOUR health and COMMIT to learning the best diet, nutrition and lifestyle choices and implementing them in your life. 

Do this and the odds are you will never be faced with a decision to take or not take the latest miracle drug, that will likely become the next big class-action law suit filed by the families of people who took the drug and died.

If you want to know more about a diet, nutrition and lifestyle approach to get in the best health of your life, check out my book 5 Steps To Optimal Health, or take a look at 5 hour download audio program… either way, follow the advice in the book and I promise you will soon feel healthier and more energetic than you’ve felt in years and will be on your way to getting in the best health of your life.

Lots more to come!

Not only can you be fat without being overweight, you can be clinically obese without being a single pound over weight.  Here’s what you need to know. 

Your body weight is a combination of muscle, fat, bone and water.

Body fat percentage, not bodyweight is the key factor in determining if and to what extent you are at risk for the plethora of health problems many overweight people develop.

This is covered in detail in 5 Steps To Optimal Health, but the short version is this, if you giggle all over, if you can’t flex a muscle or hold your midsection firm… you’ve got WAY too much fat on your body and it doesn’t matter a bit what you happen to weigh.

Can You Pass The Giggle Test

Here’s a simple test. Stand in front of a mirror ah-natural, flex your muscles and tigtjhen your arms, midsection, bottom, hips and thighs as much as possible.  If you can tighten those muscles and they feel firm and don’t giggle when you move, congratulations.  However, if your muscles are loose and flabby no matter how hard you flex them, you are fat and this is true regardless of how much you weigh. 

Body Fat Percentage NOT Bodyweight Determines Whether Or Not A Person Is Fat

According to The American Dietetic Association and the National Research Council a body fat percentage greater than 14% in a male and greater than 19% for a female is considered over-fat to the point of increasing health risk, and a body fat percentage greater than 25% in males, and greater than 30% for females is considered clinically obese.  Given this you can see it’s possible to not be obviously overweight, and at the same time be seriously over-fat.

There’s more to being healthy than not being obviously overweight.  Of course if you are obviously overweight, losing weight may be the single best thing you can do for your health, but you goal should not be simply losing weight, the goal should be to reach a lean-healthy body weight you enjoy, with emphasis on the word LEAN.

The American Dietetic Association and the National Research Council recommendations are an excellent guide.  Aim for no more than 14% body fat for a male, (6% to 10% is considered excellent), and no more than 19% body fat for a female, (10% to 15% is considered excellent). 

Eat right, exercise, adopt the research council guidelines, follow the program in 5 Steps To Optimal Health and the odds are you will avoid the fatigue and health issues overweight people are often confronted with. 

So what’s you next step.  Check out a few of the posts on resistance exercise and learn how easy it can be to firm up so you pass the jiggle test with flying colors.

This article is written by Dr. Gabe Mirkin, reprinted with permission.

Almost all people should do some form of strength training as they age.  Aging causes loss of muscles which increases your risk for metabolic syndrome, diabetes, obesity, heart attacks and premature death (Sports Medicine, May 2010).  Contracting muscles remove sugar from the bloodstream to prevent high blood sugar levels which damage every cell in your body.
        
The authors reviewed the world’s literature and found 13 placebo-controlled studies of the effect of lifting weights on health in later life.  Weight lifting reduced HbA1c (a measure of cell damage caused by sugar stuck on cells), body fat, and systolic blood pressure.  It did not affect diastolic blood pressure, triglycerides, HDL, LDL or total cholesterol.

The only way you can enlarge muscles is to exercise them against progressive resistance.  However, a recent report explains why middle-aged people are at such high risk for injury when they start a weightlifting program (American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, May 2010). 

To enlarge muscles, you have to lift weights heavy enough to cause pain while you lift.  This damages muscle fibers.  Your immunity responds to this cell damage as it responds to an infection: with pain, swelling, and increases in white blood cells, cytokines and blood flow.  You usually recover within hours or days.  However, if you repeat a heavy workout before you recover from the previous one, it takes longer to recover and the tissue weakens, rather than being given time to heal and become stronger.  You develop a condition called inflammation in which your immunity stays active all the time and attacks your own body (in the same way that it attacks invading germs) to prevent healing. 

Older people have exaggerated changes of inflammation in their muscles (American Journal of Physiology – Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, April 2010).  If you continue to take stress and recover workouts over many months and years, your muscles become stronger and heal faster so you can lift heavier weights to grow larger muscles.
 
If you are a middle-aged person who wants to start a weight lifting program to gain the incredible health benefits of being stronger and having larger muscles, and at the same time,  avoid the extremely high rate of injury in older weight lifters, you should avoid lifting heavy weights when your muscles feel sore and are still damaged from your previous intense workout.  Check with your doctor to see if you have any condition that could be aggravated by lifting weights.
 
The first rule is that beginners should lift light for several months before they try to lift heavy.  Join a gym and use 10 to 20 machines every day. Pick the heaviest weight that you can lift 10 times in a row comfortably without hurting, and do this every day.  If you feel sore, take a day or more off.  As it becomes easier to lift a weight, increase the repetitions until you can lift that weight 25 times in a row without discomfort.

After you have followed this program for several months, you are probably ready to lift heavier weights that cause pain while you lift them. Unfortunately, the correct way to grow muscles also puts you at increased risk for injuring yourself.  Pain is necessary for the muscle damage to grow larger and stronger muscles.  I recommend getting special instruction on how to perform multiple sets that hurt, using proper form to minimize the risk of injury.Many lifters pick the heaviest weight that they can lift 10 times in a row, do three sets of 10 and feel very sore in their last set.  After an intense workout, you should not lift heavy again until the soreness goes away. 

EDITORS NOTE: Special thank to Dr. Gabe Mirkin for allowing us to reprint this excellent article.  Dr. Mirkin’s Web site has my HIGHEST POSSIBLE recommendation.

A study about childrens health released by Yale University in Washington D.C. at the 27th annual meeting of the Obesity Council,  shows that the most unhealthy breakfast cereals are the cereals most often marketed to children.

The study found that cereals marketed directly to children have 85 per cent more sugar, 65 per cent less fibre and 60 per cent more sodium than cereals marketed to adults.  (This is a trifecta nutritional badness guaranteed to cause health problems in anyone who consumes such a mixture regularly.)

The authors go on to indite cereal manufacturers for targeting children with advertising and in-store promotions.  They suggest self-regulation of advertising is not effective and stronger regulation would be in order. 

But the question arises… does advertising force parents to purchase products?  Do advertisers force parents to feed their children nutritionally bankrupt food?  Or is that a choice parents make and follow through with on their own? 

The fact is, children do not purchase breakfast cereal, parents do.  Cereal companies do force parents to put candy-like breakfast products in the pantry to the exclusion of much healthier foods.  Cereal companies do not force-feed these products to little Johnny or Jill, parents do. 

While cereal manufacturers deserve no praise, the problem is NOT the nutritionally bankrupt cereal.  The problem is PARENTS BUY IT AND FEED IT TO THEIR CHILDREN.

The problem is NOT advertising. 

The problem is parents buy these ridiculous products masquerading as food, feed it to their little darlings, and then wonder why there are so many overweight kids and why their children are overweight and illness-prone.   

The solution is NOT government control or increased regulation.  There are already a zillion government regulations in all areas of life that, for the most part, do nothing but raise taxes, inhibit freedom, drive up costs and create more problems than they solve.  

The solution to the “great cereal advertising crisis” is for parents to accept responsibility for their childrens nutritional welfare and not leave it up to the advertising department of a cereal company. 

The solution is for parents to learn the basics of kids nutrition and learn which foods are healthy and why, and which foods destroy health regardless of how catchy the slogan is or how cute the animal mascot happens to be.

My grandchildren have no taste whatsoever for the nutritionally bankrupt sludge many children live on because my children, the parents, understand the basics of nutrition and know without doubt that a diet of high carbohydrate foods makes you fat and destroys your health and they know why this is true.  And because they understand the basics of how protein, carbohydrates and fat affect metabolism and how metabolism determines your and your childrens health, they are never hypnotized by dancing lions or cute bears into buying boxes of nutritional junk trying to imitate healthy food.

Charlie Bartlett movie full We all think we know everything about everything, but we don’t.  And if our only knowledge of nutrition comes primarily from advertising or from an unschooled recitation of the same old pop-nutrition advice thats resulted in 68% of America being overweight, then we’re doomed.   

Without an ACCURATE understanding of what food does when you put it in your mouth, chew and swallow, you simply cannot make an informed nutritional decision and you are forever at the mercy advertisers claims.  And advertisers are in the business of selling things, not producing the healthiest possible products.  And no amount of regulation will change that.

The ONLY way to make good choices for your children or yourself is to be informed.  Learn the basics of diet, nutrition and metabolism well enough that you can apply them when you eat out or when you purchase items at a grocery store you intend to prepare and feed to yourself and the people you love and care about most.

Children do not buy breakfast cereal, parents do.  Regulating advertising will not make children healthy… parents making informed choices and helping their children develop healthy eating habits will.

Intoxicating release

If you’d like to really understand the hard-core basics of how food affects your metabolism and how your metabolism determines your body weight and your quality of health throughout your entire life, take a look at my book, 5 Steps To Optimal Health. 

Better health can be yours just by taking some simple diet and nutrition, and healthy lifestyle steps to improve your health.

Research concluded decades ago we create our level of health, (or lack of it), with our diet, nutrition and lifestyle choices.  In other words, when you make better choices, odds are better health will be your reward. 

With this in mind, and borrowing from 5 Steps To Optimal Health, I hope you enjoy… 10 Ways To Improve Your Health Starting Now. 

1) Make Great Health A Conscious Goal – Deciding what you want is the most important step  towards getting it.  Make excellent health your goal and learning more and doing what it takes to have great health will seem easier than ever.  

2) Eat For Blood Sugar Control – Perhaps the #1 thing you can do to improve your health is learn to eat for blood sugar control.  If everyone in America did this, the hospitals would be mostly empty, doctors wouldn’t have much to do and there would be no health care crisis.  Eating for blood sugar control may be the most important health tip ever.  For more information; Eating For Blood Sugar Control May Be Your Best Health Tip Ever

3) Lose Weight – Being overweight is a symptom of hormones out of balance and nutrient deficiencies.  Correct this by reaching a lean-healthy body weight and you’ll feel better, healthier and stronger.  Resources for you;  10 Free Weight Loss Videos      5 Steps To Optimal Health Book   5 Steps To Optimal Health Audio Program   Best Way To Lose Weight Part One: Success Principles

4) Lower Cholesterol Naturally – The key to having a naturally healthy ldl and hdl cholesterol is understanding what causes high cholesterol.  This will help clear up the mystery of cholesterol.  Understanding Cholesterol, HDL, LDL, Ratios, Lowering Cholesterol Naturally & More

5) Understand And Overcome Food Cravings – If you suffer with food cravings, you are being held hostage by a nutrient deficiency.  Overcoming food cravings is easy when you know how.  Everything is explained detail in 5 Steps To Optimal Health and you will find this article most informative; Food Cravings Sugar Cravings and Salt Cravings – What They Mean Twins release And How To Stop Cravings In Their Tracks

6) Healthy Eating Plan – Forget about dieting and forget about the low calorie diet, low fat diet, and FOR SURE forget about the no-taste, fun-restricted diet.  The key to great health is a Lifetime Healthy Eating Plan, which is explained in detail in 5 Steps To Optimal Health.  Here are some diet reviews for you in case you’re interested: Weight Loss Diet Plans – Four Diet Plans Reviewed

7) Say No To Soft Drinks – Of all the things that can damage your health the quickest, other than drinking toilet bowl cleaner, regularly consuming soft drinks may deserve the top spot.  Find out the facts and then decide for yourself.  Soft Drinks Friend Or Foe How Soft Drinks Effect Your Health

Avoid Hydrogenated Oil – Hydrogenated oil is in a hundreds of products and hydrogenated oil is BAD, BAD, BAD for you.  Truth in labeling would require a skull and crossbones on any product containing hydrogenated oil.  Learn more Hydrogenated Oils And Your Health – What Is Hydrogenation

9) Diet And Nutrition – Nutrition plays a major role in building good health.  More than any other factor, the food that crosses your lips determines your level of health and vitality.  Good nutrition and good health are different sides of the same coin, it is impossible to have one without having the other.  Learn more: 5 Steps To Optimal Health

10) Read Food Labels – Putting something in your mouth, chewing and swallowing is one of the most intimate activities you can engage in.  Since what crosses your lips determines your level of health, reading and understanding food labels is more important than ever.  Learn more: Don’t Let Food Labels Make A Fool Out Of You! Now You Can Read Food Labels Like A Nutritional Pro

Bonus Health Tip #1

Stay Current On Important News On Health -  Staying current on health news helps you stay focused on your health, learn more and be more likely to act on what you learn.  Subscribe to Health News You Can Use – it’s free, and if you’re serious about getting into Excellent Health, I know you’ll enjoy it.

Bonus Health Tip #2

Watch The Weight Loss Videos: Even if you don’t need to lose weight, my 10 Free Weight Loss Videos are loaded with excellent diet, nutrition and healthy lifestyle information you can use every day to make healthy choices for yourself and your family.  Enjoy! 

More health tips are coming soon.

Click to listen to Dr. Russell and host Debra Duncan discuss Foods That Make You Beautiful

If you want true beauty, the kind of real, undeniable, natural, glowing gorgeousness that both men and women find irresistibly attractive, you can have it.  But this kind of beauty is not available in jars or bottles, it is only available to you if you are willing to go beyond surface-level cosmetics and potions and do the things that produce the natural glow of health that flows from the inside out.   

Your diet, nutrition and lifestyle have the strongest influence on determining the natural beauty of your complexion, skin, hair and nails, and each of these factors are almost entirely within your control. 

 Is Your Diet Enhancing Your Complexion… Or Destroying It

A fast-food, junk-food, high-sugar, high-carbohydrate diet that spikes your blood sugar throughout the day and loads you up with unhealthy fats, erases the natural glow of radiant health and replaces it with a shallow, pale complexion, tired eyes, lack-luster hair and weak nails.

On the other hand, a diet rich in protein, fresh green and brightly colored vegetables, fresh seasonal fruit and other health and delicious foods, give you at least some of the nutritional support you need to look and feel your very best… and while this is just the tip of the iceberg regarding diet and beauty, these guidelines alone are an EXCELLENT first step.

Do You Get The Essential Nutrients You Need To Let Your Natural Beauty And Healthy Complexion Shine Through?

Like a car needs oil and transmission fluid to run properly, your body needs essential nutrients to function properly.  An essential nutrient is a nutrient; 1) your body doesn’t make, and; 2) a nutrient you cannot be healthy without. 

Because your body is not capable of making essential nutrients, the only way to get them is through diet and supplementation.

Essential nutrients include vitamins, (A,B,C,D, etc.), minerals like potassium, magnesium, zinc and others, 9 essential amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein, and essential fatty acids. 

If you run short on any of the essential nutrients, your body simply is not capable of functioning at peak efficiency, and one of the most visible signs of that lack of efficiency is to replace a naturally beuatiful complexion with a pale or pasty complexion, no sparkle in the eyes, dull and listless hair, poor skin tone, lack of energy and so on. 

But of course it never has to be that way.  With a healthy diet and a few well-chosen supplements, you will unleash your natural beauty, in fact, you couldn’t hold it back if you tried.

Your Lifestyle Is Reflected In Your Natural Complexion

Of all the things that can ruin your complexion, steal your smile and suck the joy right out of your life, a high stress lifestyle, unresolved negative emotions, or anything that may cause you to be worried or upset is at the top of the list. 

The stress of negative emotions burns essential nutrients like a blow torch burns tissue paper… and without a bountiful supply of essential nutrients, wrinkles, sagging skin and a lack-luster complexion is guaranteed.

Rest, relaxation and being free of killer-stress and negative emotions is an essential part of being healthy,  and being healthy is an essential part of letting your natural beauty shine through.

In the final analysis, your diet, nutrition and lifestyle determine practically everything about the quality of your health, the quality of your natural complexion and the quality of your life.

To learn more about how diet, nutrition and lifestyle affect your health, you may want to check out my book, 5 Steps To Optimal Health.

In this video titled, Avoid The Blood Sugar Roller Coaster, which is video #6 in my free video weight loss series, you discover how not eating for blood sugar control can lead to massive health problems and why eating for blood sugar control may be the best weight loss or health improvement tip you have ever received.   Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

If your blood sugar is consistently elevated, you are at risk for most of what many doctors call the “deadly diseases of civilization”.

Insulin resistance, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type two diabetes, heart disease and many of the worst forms or cancer are all DIRECTLY LINKED in research to having consistently elevated insulin levels, which are DIRECTLY LINKED to having elevated blood sugar.  

Eating in a way that keeps your blood sugar in a normal, healthy range makes establishing a healthy body weight and becoming vibrantly healthy much more probable and much easier.

Spiking Your Blood Sugar Repeatedly Throughout The Day Will Destroy Your Health And Here Is How

Any food or drink high in sugar or carbohydrates causes your blood sugar to rise rapidly.

To stop rapidly rising blood sugar, your pancreas secretes the hormone insulin, which is like the “blood sugar police”. Insulin stops rising blood sugar in its tracks and brings it back down into a normal blood sugar range.

Your pancreas making insulin to lower rising blood sugar is normal and healthy, but if you eat in a way that keeps your blood sugar elevated throughout the day…

1) your pancreas has to make insulin repeatedly throughout the day, which means;

2) your blood-insulin level remains high throughout the day, and because of this;

3) over time you develop a resistance to the blood-sugar-lowering affect of insulin, which means your pancreas has to work harder and pump even more of that powerful hormone into your blood to lower your blood sugar… and this is where the problems really begin.

Insulin lowers blood sugar by converting the sugar in your blood into fat, so instead of having high blood sugar, you have high blood fat. To get rid of the fat, the insulin causes your body to stop burning stored body fat for energy and causes you to start burning new fat that started out a few minutes prior as a soft drink, candy or chips, a piece of bread, or anything high in sugar or carbohydrates.

Your body makes substantially more fat from any food or drink high in sugar or carbohydrates than you will ever burn sitting at a desk or puttering around the house.  And all the fat not immediately burned for energy, is shoved into your fat cells, which grow, and expand, and get bigger and bigger, which means you gain weight.

Besides being the ROOT CAUSE of pracrtically ALL weight gain, elevated insulin caused by not eating for blood sugar control, is the DIRECT and PRIMARY cause of most high blood pressure, most high cholesterol, practically all type-two diabetes, and so on.

Perhaps the best health tip and the best weight loss tip ever is simply to learn to eat for blood sugar control… because when you do this, you naturally burn stored body fat for energy, you do not make and store new fat, and, in all probability, your blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides and other important health indicators will remain in a normal healthy range, without any special effort on your part.

On one level, being healthy, vital and strong requires only two simple steps;

1) Do things that help your body create health and vitality, like eating for blood sugar control, and;

2) Avoid things that interfere with your body’s ability to function at it’s natural, healthiest best, like eating anything that spikes your blood sugar repeatedly throughout the day, like soft drinks, candy, bread, rice. potatoes, pasta, chips, and so on. 

Please share this information with your friends and loved ones. The information in this video is extremely powerful and accurate. Put it to work in your life and I guarantee you will benefit.