Book Review: The Diet Cure

Now, you might think it strange that I’m writing a book review for “The Diet Cure” by Julia Ross.  While I am a health coach, I don’t specialize in weight loss.  Instead, I specialize in helping people recover from symptoms of chronic neurological and/or autoimmune issues like autism, ADHD, allergies, asthma, SPD, lupus, fibromyalgia, Lyme and more.

But I don’t like throwing the baby out with the bath water, so I read the book to see what’s in it for my clients.  There’s a lot!

In the book, Ms. Ross teaches us about adrenal, thyroid, yeast-overgrowth, nutritional deficiencies, fatty-acid deficiency, food sensitivities and blood-sugar issues, which are all common in my clients (both the children and their mothers) and how many of these issues can be controlled with diet (food choices) as well as amino acid therapy.

She recommends a whole-foods diet for all of these issues, as well as an Atkins-ish diet especially for those with blood sugar issues. It’s about the elimination of sugar with an emphasis on protein and fats to keep you full.  For anyone that’s ever done the Atkins diet, you know that one piece of bread will send you into a carb-lover’s binge-fest.

Ms. Ross provides us with the missing links for why the Atkins diet is not successful in the long run:

  • “Dr. Atkins did not know that carbs could be more addictive than cocaine.”
  • “Dr. Atkins specifically did not recognize the addictive power of grains, particularly wheat, for many people.”

The key to overcoming carb and sugar addiction is the addition of the amino acids that Ms. Ross recommends.

The book goes step-by-step into explaining how the factors I mentioned above as well as depleted brain chemistry and malnutrition from chronic dieting make it almost impossible to stay at a healthy weight.  Ms. Ross also shows us how to correct these imbalances.

Given that Ms. Ross has headed up the Recovery Systems Clinic for many years, she has dealt with the full gamut of different types of addiction (drug, alcohol and food).  She writes that the reason her clinic is so successful is because of the use of amino acid therapy to correct these biochemical imbalances in the brain and elsewhere.  It’s not willpower; it’s biochemistry.

When I read this book, I took a step back and looked at it from my perspective of not only a health coach but also the media director and a board member of Epidemic Answers, a non-profit that lets parents know that recovery is possible from autism, ADHD, SPD, allergies, asthma, autoimmune and more.

We let parents know WHY there is such an epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses:  it’s a perfect storm of the Standard American diet that is nutritionally deficient, the overuse of antibiotics, toxins in our environment, stressful lifestyles and gut dysbiosis (an imbalance of good vs. bad gut flora).

But when I read this book, I thought, “Huh.  All those women that have been on nutritionally deficient diets for years since at least the 1970’s are having kids, and those kids are being born with nutritional deficiencies that are compounded by gut dysbiosis, toxicity and stress.  No wonder we’re seeing such epidemics of autism, ADHD, allergies and more.”

Moms being on nutritionally deficient diets isn’t the only reason for this epidemic, but it certainly plays a key, overlooked role.

I’ll be hosting Ms. Ross on my upcoming webinar on April 23, 2014 at 1:00pm ET.  We’ll be discussing these imbalances and how to correct them with amino acids and diet, and you can sign up for your chance to ask questions here.

 

Baking Soda and Health

Baking Soda and HealthI have to say, I was fascinated with the material in Dr. Mark Sircus’ book, “Sodium Bicarbonate:  Rich Man’s, Poor Man’s Cancer Treatment” because it provides a fundamental framework for understanding the nature of disease:  that chronic health conditions and diseases arise from an acidic state of the body.

This book is an interesting look at the link between baking soda and health.

Sign up below to get the webinar replay of my interview of him.

What pH Leads to Optimal Health?

By this point, many of us may have heard or read that an alkaline body is required for good health or its converse, that an acidic body develops diseases and disorders.  If you haven’t heard about this, that’s OK, just know that a slightly alkaline body pH of 7.35 – 7.45 is optimal.

Dr. Mark Sircus lays the foundation for why this pH level is optimal:  because “excessive acidic pH leads to cellular deterioration” and because “acid conditions increase the strength of oxygen free radical reactions which are involved in the processes of cell injury and cell death”.

Anyone who knows my work as a Certified Holistic Health Counselor knows that I am constantly harping about inflammation.  Inflammation is caused by the aforementioned free-radical reactions and is a common underlying factor in chronic diseases and conditions.

Acid Conditions Lead to Inflammation

So, here we have an underlying factor to the underlying factor of inflammation:  acid conditions in the body.  Not only that, but Dr. Sircus digs further to show us that this increased oxidative stress caused by free radicals, which is caused by an acidic condition, is especially dangerous to our mitochondria.  Aha!

Mitochondrial dysfunction is beginning to be shown by researchers to be a common underlying issue in conditions ranging from autism to Parkinson’s, and I’m betting that it goes deeper than that:  I’m betting it’s common in most, if not all, chronic diseases and conditions, which is, I believe, essentially what Dr. Sircus is getting at, too.

If I understand this correctly, then an acidic body condition => free-radical generation => oxidative stress => inflammation => mitochondrial dysfunction (in a nutshell).

So here’s a simplified, yet elegant, approach to understanding the nature of disease:  an acidic body condition, which is brought about by our Standard American Diet (SAD), toxicity, especially from heavy metals, stressful lifestyles and radiation, such as from EMFs.

Not only does Dr. Sircus deliver this framework, but he also dives deeper into two diseases with growing rates of incidence:  diabetes and cancer.

Diabetes and Cancer

Type 2 diabetes occurs when the body’s cells become insulin-resistant, so the pancreas, which produces insulin, has to make more and more insulin to keep stuffing our excess blood sugar into our cells.

Dr. Sircus writes that “the pancreas, an organ largely responsible for pH control, is one of the first organs affected when general pH shifts to the acidic” and that “once there is an inhibition of pancreatic function and pancreatic bicarbonate flow, there naturally follows a chain reaction of inflammatory reactions throughout the body”.

He also points out that heavy-metal toxicity, other toxic chemicals and radiation “will affect, weaken and destroy pancreatic tissues.”  Interesting (at least to me)!

What’s even more interesting is what Dr. Sircus writes about cancer:  “Cancer patients have a saliva pH of 4.5 to 5.5.  Healthy people have a pH of 7.0 to 7.5.”  He points out that way back in 1931, “Dr. Otto Warburg discovered that ‘to become malignant, cancer must have low oxygen, strong acid environment'”, so this is not new news, although it appears it’s been forgotten.

Baking Soda and Cancer

So what happens when cancer patients alkalize their bodies?  He indicates that “Cancer cells become dormant at pH 7.0 and 7.5 and kills them dead at 8.0 and 8.5”.  He also advocates the use of sodium bicarbonate in cancer patients (as well as patients of other chronic conditions).

Before you start poo-pooing this idea and calling it quackery, consider that “Sodium bicarbonate is used routinely to keep the toxicity of chemotherapy agents and radiation from killing people or from destroying their kidneys.”

I caution, as does Dr. Sircus, that ingesting baking soda can be harmful if it is not done correctly because it leads the body into an overly alkaline state, which comes with its own set of of problems.  Perhaps the safest route is to toss a half cup of it into your bath and to eat a more alkaline diet.

Overall, I appreciate the material and references in this book for showing us how important an alkaline condition is and how it can be promoted with the use of sodium bicarbonate, which is baking soda.

However, I’m giving this book only 4 stars out of 5 because the book reads like a collection of blogs that weren’t edited for coherency from one chapter to the next.  In fact, there are many points where whole paragraphs are copied and pasted verbatim from one chapter to another.

The use of a professional editor would have been a good idea for this book because he or she could have added more flow and coherency while correcting the many typos and grammatical errors in the book.

I only point this out because I know, from having published many reports myself when I worked on Wall Street, that credibility is seriously lessened by such easily fixable mistakes.  If Dr. Sircus wants his ideas to receive more credibility with a bigger, mainstream audience, and I would like to see that happen, I recommend that he hire a professional editor first before publishing.

THE “R” WORD

road to recovery signYou may or may not know my personal recovery story. I have recovered my 2 sons, now ages 5 and 7, from sensory processing disorder (SPD), asthma, allergies, acid reflux and eczema with a biomedical approach, which means correcting nutritional and hormonal deficiencies, removing toxicities and correcting gut dysbiosis.

I’m still working on failure to thrive, mitochondrial dysfunction, hypothyroidism and persistent eczema in my older son. In addition, they both had developmental delays, and my older son had severe hypotonia as a baby.

I have recovered from immune dysregulation, in which I had shingles twice, the worst case of poison-ivy ever, bronchitis (which I’d never had before), constant sinus infections and constant colds that would last 3-4 weeks at a time.

My older son had immune dysregulation, too, when he was younger: he would go to preschool, get sick and be out for at least a week at a time, then go to school the next week, get sick, and the cycle repeated ad nauseum (pun intended).

I also had severe adrenal fatigue, which was caused by dealing with my older son’s severe SPD.

Adrenal fatigue caused middle-of-the-night insomnia, in which I would be awake for hours at a time in the middle of the night and be so dead tired the next day that 3 hour naps wouldn’t help.

I later learned that adrenal fatigue was the cause of the onslaught of my “female problems”, which I’d never had before: a suddenly irregular menstrual cycle, a uterine fibroid and ovarian cysts.

I also found out I have two types of anemia: iron-deficiency (the more commonly known about kind) and folate-deficiency. I learned how these and most of out other problems can be tied back to gut dysbiosis and its chronic infections, especially Candidiasis.

I also discovered that I am hypothyroid and that this may have played a large part in my sons’ problems when I was pregnant with them.

I found out that I was loaded with heavy metals, especially mercury and lead, which are the most neurologically damaging. I immediately had my sons tested and found out they were full of them, too.

It’s been very hard going through this, as most people, even most doctors, don’t know about the causes of all these problems. They don’t understand that all of these problems are related, and they certainly don’t know that recovery is possible.

We got a lot of help from changing our diets and seeing a naturopath, a functional-medicine doctor and a holistic nutritionist, as well as from me doing never-ending research about how all of these problems are connected.

We’ve recovered from so much, although there is still more work to be done. In any case, we are so much better off now than we were 4 years ago, when all of these problems hit a crescendo.

I want people to know that recovery is possible, which is why I joined the non-profit Epidemic Answers. We seek to educate parents about the causes of these problems as well as let them know that recovery is possible.

In fact, we’re making a documentary film to show the world that recovery is possible because most people just don’t know that.

Most people don’t know that a child can recover from autism or asthma or that an adult can recover from an autoimmune disease, even multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis.

If you want to learn more about our film, you can find out more by watching this video or by visiting our website. Please help us get this film made!

 

ADRENAL FATIGUE

exhaustionI became severely stressed when I began taking care of my two boys without any help because that’s when my older son’s sensory issues and “fight, fright or flight” issues really kicked in.  [Read more…]

WHAT IS GUT DYSBIOSIS?

fungal myceliaGut dysbiosis — this topic is the motherlode.  It’s one of the two core (in my opinion) reasons for the explosion of chronic childhood illnesses we see today.

Gut Dysbiosis:  A Common Link Among the Epidemic of Children’s Chronic Illnesses

First, let’s discuss the numbers behind this epidemic:  How many kids did you know when you were growing up that had autism, ADHD, acid reflux, allergies, asthma, developmental delays and/or mental health issues?  [Read more…]

HEALING ECZEMA WITH THE GAPS DIET

My sons have had eczema their whole lives.  It has ranged from cradle cap (did you know that was a form of eczema?) to itchy bumps in the creases of the knees and elbows to full-blown bloody red rashes on the arms and legs.

Pediatricians, as usual (sorry!), were useless in treating eczema.  Their standard advice was to “put a little cortisone cream on it”.  I did try that a few times at first with my older son, but I quickly grew worried about the effects of it on his already-poor immune system.  [Read more…]

RECOVERY FROM SENSORY PROCESSING DISORDER, REFLUX, ASTHMA, ECZEMA

older sonMy Children: Recovered from Sensory Processing Disorder, Acid Reflux, Asthma and Eczema, and getting healthier everyday!

(NOTE:  This is a blog I wrote for Epidemic Answers, a 501(c)3 non-profit of which I am a Board Member.  We let parents know that recovery is possible from autism, PDD-NOS, ADHD, allergies, asthma, autoimmune diseases and other chronic children’s health disorders.)

I have recovered my sons from sensory processing disorder (SPD), acid reflux,  asthma and eczema.  [Read more…]

THE “R” WORD

recover button

recover button

You may or may not know my personal recovery story.

I have recovered my 2 sons, now ages 6 and 8, from sensory processing disorder (SPD), asthma and acid reflux with a biomedical approach, which means correcting nutritional and hormonal deficiencies, removing toxicities and correcting gut dysbiosis.

I’m still working on failure to thrive, mitochondrial dysfunction and hypothyroidism.  In addition, they both had developmental delays, and my older son had severe hypotonia as a baby.

I have recovered from immune dysregulation, in which I had shingles twice, the worst case of poison-ivy ever, bronchitis (which I’d never had before), constant sinus infections and constant colds that would last 3-4 weeks at a time.  [Read more…]

WHICH PATHOGENS LURK IN YOUR GUT?

CandidaDid you know that gut dysbiosis, which means there are too many pathogens outnumbering probiotic bacteria, is linked to autism, PDD-NOS, ADHD, allergies, asthma, sensory processing disorder, colic, eczema, IBS and autoimmune diseases like lupus, fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis?

If your gut is dysbiotic, you likely have immune dysregulation.

For $99 or less (the more you order, the cheaper it is), you can find out which good guys and bad guys are taking up residence inside of you.

If you’ve ever had any kind of stool analysis done, you’ll know this is a bargain price AND the results are anonymously documented in the Human Microbiome Project.  Read more…

 

Why Is Gut Dysbiosis So Bad for You?

Why Is Gut Dysbiosis So Bad for You?Gut dysbiosis is an imbalance of good vs. bad bacteria, yeast and other pathogens in your intestines. This is important because most of our immune system is located in our gastrointestinal tract, as most pathogens enter our bodies through our mouths.

Gut dysbiosis can cause lowered dopamine and lowered serotonin, as well as an inability to remember something in the short term, because most neurotransmitters are made in the intestines.

It can also cause leaky gut (intestinal permeability) which means that waste products that should be pooped out are not and are instead leaking out and causing an immune response.

Gut dysbiosis also causes nutritional deficiencies and can lower thyroid function, as well as cause lowered excretion of waste through the kidneys.

In addition, it causes increased ghrelin and lowered leptin, making you feel hungrier than you should, thereby contributing to weight gain.

Toxins produced by gut pathogens impairs your liver’s ability to detoxify, and because they are stressors, your adrenal glands will produce more cortisol, leading to fatigue and an inability to handle stress.

Gut dysbiosis causes inflammation and oxidative stress, as well as damage mitochondria, thereby increasing fatigue and lowering glutathione, the body’s powerful antioxidant.