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To follow on from my last article in this mini series on How Healthy is Your Diet? which looked at why soda is so bad for you, I decided to switch sides and look at something that is good for you. In our society that seems hell bent on poisoning itself with processed foods, additive and saturated fat laden junk and all manner of other unhealthy stuff that the media does a very good job of convincing us that it is all good, a natural progression toward more health giving foods would be a good choice of moves.

There are lots of healthy foods that we can choose to eat and many of us actually do include many of these in our diets. Just not enough or not in the right way. So this article will take a look at one of them, which is that great all rounder health giving bulb that we either love or hate. That’s that smelly little bulb adored by most people in the world apart from Brits, Americans and a even few Aussies — garlic.

Oh So Healthy Garlic

Garlic, which contains both allicin and diallyl sulphides is a member of the onion family and as such possesses similar blood cleansing properties. But it is much more than just a cholesterol busting flavorsome addition to food.

In its raw state, garlic is at its most potent and all of its health giving properties are at their best. It should be used as soon as possible after peeling the papery skin from the bulb. As soon as you cook it, you destroy most of its goodness, so the best way to enjoy this power-packed little bulb is raw, chopped finely and sprinkled over cooked food just before you eat it or into salads where it adds a lot of flavor and zing!

Medicinal Garlic

So to the health-giving properties of garlic. It is antibacterial, antiviral and anti-fungal, making it a great all rounder for fighting most illnesses from the common cold (viral) and flu, to bacterial attacks inside (eg food poisoning) and outside the body (eg infected cuts) as well as fungal attacks (eg athlete’s foot).

Garlic also helps boost the immune system, further helping the body to naturally fight off disease and infection and is also an antioxidant, helping to mop up dangerous free radicals and prevent cancer cells from forming. For helping to maintain health, there are few foods to match this pungent little bulb!

As a food, it contains essential minerals and vitamins including all the B vitamins, vitamin C, calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus potassium and zinc. It really is a powerful nutrient-packed addition to any diet.

Antisocial Garlic

Many people avoid garlic as they are concerned about the bad breath it gives you. Well, you can cut this drastically by taking garlic capsules, but you have to consider your own health above all else. If you are more concerned with what other people think of you, then you are not concerned enough with your own well-being and that is a situation which cannot be.

Interestingly, many smokers are quick to wrinkle their noses up at garlic eaters without realizing just how disgusting their own stale tobacco breaths smell to non-smokers! Just putting things into perspective, here.

When you eat garlic yourself, you cannot smell it on another person’s breath. So if someone wrinkles up their nose at you next time you have eaten garlic, just remind yourself that you are healthier inside than they are and to hell with what they think!

On that note, I think it best to leave you there to ponder your own social dilemmas and will return soon with another healthy foods article!

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Most of us have tried or at least seen one of those chairs that have built in massagers to take care of all the tension in your back and legs. They seem like a luxury item, and thanks to quite a hefty price tag most of us won’t be able to afford them in our homes, but we can use them in places like health spas for a small price. It seems though that these massage chairs are not only a luxury item for people who can’t think of anything else to do with their money, but they can also bring about quite a few benefits for people who have gone through heart surgery, or are otherwise heart patients.

Some doctors do not recommend, and in fact can ban you from having a massage after you have gone through a heart surgery, but according to Mayo Clinic, it could actually be a good thing. They recommend light massage therapy for anyone who has gone through the surgery as it will speed up recovery and at the same time it will make the time more enjoyable. According to a study they did, getting regular massages actually significantly sped up the recovery from the surgery, and it reduced pain and anxiety that is often related to a post surgery state.

Now they didn’t really use massage chairs for the process, and we can be pretty sure that chair manufacturers will not market their products for this purpose because they want to  be careful, but when used on a light massage program, an electric massager could bring similar benefits than a therapy given by a professional. Of course you can’t expect a machine to give similar therapy as a well trained professional, but this study points towards the fact that it could be safe to use massagers to reduce pain and help the patient relax. After all, when you reduce your pain and are able to get rid of tension and anxiety, you will feel better about your recovery and it has been shown frequently that a positive mind will not only speed up recovery but it will also make it a lot more pleasant.

Many of these massage chairs are able to deliver a wide array of massage programs ranging from aggressive deep tissue massage all the way to just a comfortable lymphatic massage. There are many settings from shiatsu to vibrating to swedish massage, and should someone use a chair like this for the above mentioned purposes, they should always consult their doctor first. At the same time you should keep the massage at a comfortable level so that you will still enjoy it and be able to stimulate circulation and relax those achy and tense muscles. After all, getting comfortable is the whole purpose of these chairs. If you can’t afford to purchase one for your home, you could find a health club where you can use one. It is much cheaper than booking an appointment with a professional massage therapist, and usually you can find a free chair much easier than a massage therapist that has the time for you.

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In this post, I’d like to talk about how we can stay healthy despite it all. By that I mean how we as a race manage to remain healthy even though we are fed on a diet of food that is mass produced, full of potentially harmful artificial additives and deficient in many of the essential vitamins and minerals that we need.

The mineral and nutrient deficiency in the vast majority of food that we buy is a serious problem that the enlightened amongst us can do quite a lot about. First thing that needs to happen is for more people to stand up and tell the food industry that this is just not good enough. Unfortunately, the food industry as a whole is extremely powerful and has a veritable army of PR people who are very good at swaying public opinion away from the important issues. They have managed to force the US Congress to U turn on several additive bans and health issues over the decades, such is their reach and power of persuasion.

You have to see past this.

A minor revolution that is going to be good for the general health of people is already happening in the farming industry with smaller, breakaway farmers returning to traditional farming methods and turning their backs on the lethal cocktails of chemical fertilizers, pesticides etc that intensive farming methods employ. They are, instead, turning to organic farming methods that drastically cut the need for the vast majority of these chemicals. They are once again treating the soil with the respect it deserves and being repaid with healthier crops that are regaining their nutrient levels.

This is extremely good news for you and your family’s health.

It means that you can buy organically grown fruit and vegetables that are virtually free of chemicals (the UK Soil Association allows a maximum of 6 chemical pest control substances to be used on crops that can then be labeled “organic”). This will help us to stay healthy from the inside out.

By using natural organic matter to enrich the soil (instead of chemical fertilizer) the friendly bugs along with the worms return to play their part in the overall scheme of things. Together, this produces healthier crops that taste better, leading to healthy eating and a better chance of enjoying better overall health.

The downside is they cost more, but what price are you going to place on your children’s health? I reckon its a price well worth paying.

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Many health problems these days are directly or indirectly caused by accumulation of man made toxins in our bodies. Every time factories pollute the air, or release their waste in the waters, we are exposed to the waste. Not necessarily directly, but as the water gets polluted the crops that are watered get polluted. When the air is no longer clean, the air we are breathing is not clean, and neither is the rain that waters the plants we eat, and the plats the animals we eat, eat. This puts a dramatic stress on our bodys’ detoxification systems, and the modern day nutritional habits can’t cope up with this.

Most people are fundamentally against eating vitamin supplements and using herbal supplements to help maintain their health. They say that “a versatile diet is all I need”. The problem is that most of these people don’t eat a versatile diet, and because our vegetables are power-grown we no longer get enough vitamins and minerals from them. Most of the fruits we eat are imported, and they are picked from the trees when they still are raw. They don’t develop as much antioxidants as they should, and as a result, we don’t get enough antioxidants from them. This is where using a body detox kit on a regular basis will come in to the picture.

As we are exposed to more toxins than our bodies can handle, and our detoxification systems lack the necessary elements to function at full power, we need to supply the system and avoid possible pollution. Unfortunately most of the pollution is unavoidable, and even in remote areas of the north pole, we can find chemicals that have travelled there airborne. So all we can do is detoxify, detoxify and detoxify. What do we need to detox properly? We need vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. We might also need specific natural compounds which boost our liver detoxification pathways. These can be a key in a detox program, and between these perhaps week long programs, one should supply the body with enough vitamins, minerals and antioxidants to keep the process going.

The body is a complex system, and going in to details on how one can benefit from detox kits can be too much for the scope of this medium. What I do want to emphasize is that when you get rid of your waste more efficiently, your body will have more power to burn fat and keep your immune functions working properly. Also when harmful estrogens leave your body, the risk for diseases such as cancer reduce. And when you lose weight, you are less likely to get diabetes or CVD.

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There are several super foods that are known to have many health giving properties, but one of the most exciting of all must be green tea. Its been used for many centuries by the Chinese and other Asian civilizations as both traditional beverage and health giving infusion. In the West, we have finally woken up this sleeping dragon and are discovering new ways in which it can benefit our health.

Of all the amazing properties crammed into a cup of this tasty beverage, one of the most important is not necessarily its antioxidants, or weight loss properties, but its ability to calm the mind and soothe the soul, or in short, to relieve stress. For of all the problems that negatively affect a person’s health, stress is the worst and most widely damaging of them all. Anything we can do to avoid stress should be done and if we can’t avoid it, then we should learn how to deal with it so that it becomes no big deal.

Drinking green tea promotes the release of the relaxing hormone serotonin in the brain and this is the property that can help us to relieve the stress if we are suffering from it. But there’s even more to it than that and this is something that we haven’t considered yet, at least in teh West.

The very act of preparing and drinking green tea in the East is a ritual that great care is taken over, great reverence applied to and traditional rules adhered to. Why is this? If you’ve ever watched the tea ceremony being performed, you would wonder at the slow, deliberate and careful way in which it is done.

And therein lies the secret.

Preparing to receive a cup of green tea brewed and served in the traditional manner is part of a process that relaxes the body. This allows the stress to melt away, while the actual drinking of the tea acts on the brain to send those good feeling hormones through the body to complete the task of attaining a state of relaxation.

In the West, we concentrate on the scientific reasons why green tea relieves stress while ignoring the other side to the process which is the physical slowing down of the body to receive it. Sure, the chemical properties of this beverage will do a body no end of good. But that good could be enhanced greatly by taking the time to drink it the way it was meant to be taken, as we have been shown by our oriental teachers but in the most part chosen to ignore.

In our fast paced western lifestyle, we don’t take the time for such things, which is a big part of the reason we have so much stress in the first place!
We package up the product in teabags that can be thrown into a cup of boiling water and drank as fast as possible so we can get on to the next thing we have to be doing. This is not the way it was intended to be taken and I believe that if we were to take the time to do it correctly, then the benefits to health in general would certainly be enhanced.

As for the other properties of this amazing tea, of course antioxidants are incredibly important for mopping up those damaging free radicals. The polyphenol EGCG is much more powerful than the resveratrol found in red wine and is found in abundance in green tea. It is also worth buying organic green tea rather than cheaper brands that may also come with a payload of chemical pesticides and other nasties.

As for drinking green tea to lose weight, it does this in two ways. First it contains caffeine, which ordinarily would boost the metabolism to cause the body to burn calories faster, but while levels of caffeine are lower in this tea than black tea or coffee, it combines with other chemicals not present in those other beverages to cause the metabolism to work even faster. Second, drinking this tea suppresses the insulin response to eating foods (or drinking drinks) that are high in refined sugars. This leads to less visceral (belly) fat being stored and therefore helps to control weight gain.

There are many other health properties associated with drinking green tea that we will include in a future post here.

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Here’s another installment in what appears to be another of my famous mini-series that pepper my blogs and websites, all about how to improve your lifestyle. We’ve already looked at the basics of getting up and away from the mind-sapping television and forcing yourself into a positive frame of mind in order to place yourself in a state of readiness to press forward towards a more healthy lifestyle.

Then we looked at the powerful technique of visualization – using your imagination to place yourself as you wish to be right now in the present. That works so well in itself that it completely upends your mindset into believing that whatever you wish to achieve, you can.

Now to take the next step and actually do it.

You have a powerful picture in your mind of how you want yourself to appear, how healthy and fit you wish to be etc. Now you use that as the template to drive yourself towards that goal. Make sure the goal is truly achievable for you else if you try to aim for too much you may not be able to realize it even in your mind as your unconscious will take over and tell you that its more than you are capable of achieving. But an achievable goal, once set in your mind, will be easy to visualize and materialize.

By being in the right frame of mind and actually having seen how you will be in your mind’s own eye, you will find it a pleasurable and simple task to take the necessary action to achieve that goal.

You will find that you will want to take on that new exercise regime and happily stick to it, because you will not see it as a chore that must be endured, but rather a pleasurable experience that you always look forward to. You’ll find that you will cut out the bad foods from your diet and only eat sensibly and feel happy to do it – rather than miserable at missing out on those fat and cholesterol producing cakes and biscuits that will no longer be a part of your life.

Then you are happily on the road to your new healthy lifestyle!

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