Content Sections
Why one size fits all diets don’t work
Born out of the TwinsUK Study, the Predict study (the result of which were exclusively revealed this week by Jerome Burne in the Mail Online) potentially provides another nail in the coffin for traditional weight-loss programmes as it shows how individual our metabolic responses are to different foods. Researchers tracked the changes in levels of blood glucose, insulin and triglycerides (fats) after eating different nutrients in 1,100 individuals. Key to this study was the use of identical twins who, despite sharing the same genetic profile and largely similar environments, have been found to metabolise foods differently. The study collected data on a wide range of factors that can impact the way we metabolise macro nutrients — fat, carbohydrates, proteins, plus the diversity of our gut microbiota, levels of exercise, stress profile and sleep quality. The team’s findings won't be new to integrated/functional medicine or nutrition professionals. The findings reinforce the power that our diet, lifestyle and environment exerts over our metabolism and ultimately our health and resilience. In short, intermittent fasting is beneficial, the body processes nutrients better with sufficient sleep, diversity of our gut microbiome is essential and one-size doesn't fit all when it comes to nutrition. The results also show why the calorie in/out theory is no longer relevant for weight management or health and why existing government guidelines are contributing to the rapid spiralling of obesity and related chronic disease. A word of caution though – even if it were found that sugar laden chocolate brownies didn't spike your blood sugar when tested, it doesn't mean that you should indulge regularly. Sugar is still sugar! Unsurprisingly the research is finding it's way into a new app due for release that apparently will be able to 'predict' how your body will respond to almost every food you eat. We await its arrival with interest.
Feeding your gut bugs could future-proof your brain health
A new mouse study published in Nature suggests that having an unhealthy gut microbiome with a lack of diversity as we age may contribute to cognitive decline in later years. Researchers using a mouse model enriched the animal’s diets with the prebiotic fibre inulin. As expected, increases in Bifidobacterium were found, but even in middle-aged mice, levels of Akkermansia bacteria (one of the most important bacterial species found in our gut) were found to be similar to younger mice. The changes in microbiota composition accompanied improved cognitive tests and reductions in anxiety-like behaviours. The results add to existing studies on the benefits of plant-based diets to contribute to healthy ageing not just in mice, but humans also. Although there is no precise definition of what a plant-based diet is, at ANH-Intl we use the term to describe a diet that includes at least 50% by weight of whole, unprocessed vegetables with minimal fruit. Here are some of our top tips for incorporating more plant foods into your diet to help you live a longer, healthier life.
Opioid crisis triggers lawsuits
Opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma is being sued by 48 US States who’re accusing the company of understating the risks of addiction to their opioid drug OxyContin. The State of Oklahoma is also suing Johnson & Johnson for damages over their marketing of opioids. Unsurprisingly, given the scale of the problem the crisis was a central theme at the recent Institute for Functional Medicine’s Annual Conference in San Antonio. A current report from the OECD shows a 20% increase in opioid-related deaths for 2011-2016 across 25 countries with the biggest rises seen in the United States, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, and England and Wales. It’s clear that drugs don’t fix the problem. In fact, more often, they compound and contribute to even bigger problems. More now than ever there is a need to find non-drug solutions to reduce the use and abuse of such powerful drugs, which are over prescribed, often for longer duration than warranted for the condition which leads to addiction. The ANH-Intl health sustainability blueprint sets out an alternative way to manage our health promoting the creation of vital health as opposed to the management of disease by balancing our Ecological Terrain and its 12 domains of health.
Italian court rules cannabis derivatives illegal
Following attacks on CBD products around the EU along with the European Food Safety Authority's (EFSA) addition of plant-based cannabinoids to the novel foods register, the Supreme Court of Italy has deemed all cannabis derivatives to be illegal. This further adds to the confusion around the legality of cannabis derivatives such as oils, buds, flowers, leaves and resins . The Judges said selling such products will be a criminal act and that they, “...cannot be sold under any circumstances”, which flies in the face of a 2016 draft regulation stating that products containing less that 0.2% of THC (the psychoactive substance in cannabis) are legal. Manufacturers and suppliers of related products await further clarification of the ruling and the Court’s reference to “doping” to fully understand how this will affect the future of cannabis products in Italy and its impact on those citizens who use them to avoid using drugs such as opioids.
Golden rice failure
Indian scientists have dealt yet another blow to the developers of GM golden rice after they found its beta-carotene content rapidly degrades when stored following harvest. The scientists concluded the only way to ‘preserve’ the beta-carotene content is to vacuum pack it immediately (no doubt in plastic!) putting it beyond the reach of the very countries it’s designed to help. The reality is that the millions of dollars and years of research spent on developing golden rice could have been put to far better use ensuring people have access to a varied and nourishing diet.
Comments
your voice counts
13 June 2019 at 9:42 am
WHO is in control!
Or more accurately, NGO's operating as fronts for disproportionate wealth seeking disproportionate and pervasive power, through the back door of manipulative deceit rather than in open relational communication or indeed Reason Itself.
But deceit can only 'control' a willingness to be deceived - and this is where a deeper self-honesty has to challenge our pet loves , fears and hates, for deceits offer self-inflations, relative to our respective aversions and un-faced or unhealed relational conflict.
but the disposition of a mind under deceit is to script in terms of control and subjection - through pathogenic actors and 'saviour' interventions, that personalise into polarised and filtered conflict and limitation what is actually and expression of communication toward balance - but generally unseen and unrecognized by the addiction and affliction of conflict as the hope, wish or promise of control as some kind of personal power or personal - (read private) - salvation.
It is my sense that what we act from as belief and expectation, is effectively scripting our reality-experience regardless what actually is the case and that what we think we believe is belied by our own thought, word and deed, and yet to a large extent masked out from full awareness by personal and social mores or indeed memes of mutually reinforcing 'acceptability' of officially accepted narrative reality.
I have read of monkey traps where the monkey can reach into a fixed down gourd to grasp a fruit but cannot then retrieve the hand with the fruit and also cannot release it grasp on what it wants, and so can be collected or harvested by the trapper.
Much of what we think we want, hurts us, but is framed in mind so as to seem to be a dissonance with a cause outside ourself.
This is when what we want is framed and defined by what we are in fear of and aversion to, rather than a directly felt true desire.
Framed in sickness and lack, we can only seek power in terms of sickness and lack - which is the corrupted idea of power that seems to control our world because that is the idea given power by a mind in conflict and fear as the attempt to limit and suppress the chaos and 'contagion' of a breakdown of communication by the imposition or interjection of 'control' into the pain of a lost Intimacy.
The nature of a healthy mind and body is its transparency to living relational being. In a sense we do not know what we are until we lose it for a conflicted entanglement in what we are not - and then have the experience of lack and loss of connection, communication and free expression to self-doubt and division that then projects to frame and colour a 'world gone wrong'.
So while I could indicate all sorts of pointers in the world for 'who is in control', I also recognise they are scripted or cast as expressions of the fear of life, of intimacy and communication, seemingly powerful in their role as the framing of narrative reality as the hidden basis of 'control' by filtering and distorting limitation or induced and enforced scarcity, lack and toxicity. For without such conditions a corrupt and corrupting 'power' could have no appeal nor induce allegiance and compliance in sacrifice of self, others - and biosphere - to a fantasy of life and power given worth-ship in false with-ness as an act of mental and emotional (psychic) dissociation acted out upon the body and dumped upon the body as a burden of strain and toxicity that cannot be 'sustained' without the deceits of the mind that packages toxic debt into complex instruments that are then passed off as if a positive appreciation, a roadmap to salvation, or a masking identity of self-justifiction by which to temporarily outsource or assign pain or consequence of an ill-gotten grasp to anywhere and anyone ELSE.
The body is our corporate expression, using it for loveless or conflicted and divisive agenda, blocks its function to generate a like reflection of blocked or conflicted world in which the body is raised as the personification of a separated mind or reality in 'escape' from or 'victory' over feared Life, at the same time as being abused and exploited and dumped on - with the consequence of asserting and persisting in using life of self and other for getting - FORGETTING.
Getting is the generation of the experience of self-lack. The issues of possession and control are those of marketising and weaponising - which is the call to suckle the teat of deceit as the milk of false premises, promises and outcomes.
Awakening responsibility for consciousness is the simple willingness that breaks the spell. The naked 'Emperor' is not attacked by truth weaponised and seeking vengeance, but given true 'with-ness' in shared worth-ship of a wholeness of being.
"who told you, you were naked?" said the Lord - may reveal its meaning in terms of a sense of self-lack arising from mistaken identification. As in being phished by the forms of something that are presented or interpreted unmindfully. Or rather through the filtering of a mindset of auto-reaction. The replacement of human kind by systemic or robotic substitution is the logical outcome of out-sourcing intelligence in fear of dispossession and loss of control. Harmony is of relational being and a signature of wholeness. When we try to fix it or grasp it in fixed forms we 'kill' the music - or rather sacrifice our capacity to be truly moved for a carrot or a stick and so paint ourself into a corner from which we cannot escape. Rather than seek complex repackaging of toxic debts in the Newspeak, of weaponised and marketised insight, why not cancel or expunge the debt and clear the account?
Release and be released is simple an awakened alignment in 'give as you would receive'. The unseen power of denial 'scripts' our perception and response. Fear has to be owned to be transformed and undone by true with-ness in shared worth-ship, giving in the measure of a true receipt. Willingness releases a false but driven sense of self-will because we are willing to listen for truth instead of telling it what to be.
Your voice counts
We welcome your comments and are very interested in your point of view, but we ask that you keep them relevant to the article, that they be civil and without commercial links. All comments are moderated prior to being published. We reserve the right to edit or not publish comments that we consider abusive or offensive.
There is extra content here from a third party provider. You will be unable to see this content unless you agree to allow Content Cookies. Cookie Preferences