When You Eat Matters

It’s not all what you eat, but when you eat it that might lead to weight gain, according to a new laboratory study. In the study, the Northwestern University researchers fed two groups of mice a high fat-diet: one group ate only during the day and the other only at night. Mice are normally nocturnal and consume less during the day and more at night.

After six weeks, the daytime eaters gained significantly more weight than the nighttime eaters, that is the mice eating at odds with their normal sleep/wake cycle gained more. The daytime eating mice were slightly less active and ate slightly more than the nighttime eaters, note the authors, which may have led to a cumulative effect. The results show that simply modifying eating times may affect body weight and suggests that the body’s natural 24-hour circadian rhythm may play a role in metabolic processes.

And on the topic of what you eat, the National Cancer Institute recently estimated that Americans consume 22 teaspoons of sugar per day (355 calories), on average. Imagine the health improvement, weight reduction and reduced cost on the health care system if everyone reduced that number by half!

There's a new recipe for Squash Supreme on our website, to view it click here.

Yours in health,

Pamela

Swine Flu and Naturopathic Medicine

As we all know, prevention is always the best medicine. As much as I'm not buying into all the hype around the swine flu (just as I didn't around the avian flu or West Nile virus), it never hurts to do a little preventative maintenance just to be safe.

There was a 2007 study comparing the flu vaccine with 1 capsule of colostrum daily. The study had 2 parts. The first part looked at healthy adults and the second looked at patients with advanced cardiovascular disease.

Groups in the first part were vaccine alone, colostrum alone, vaccine + colostrum, and no treatment.

Colostrum was 4 times more effective than the flu vaccine. Colostrum was 3 times more effective than no treatment. The flu vaccine was actually worse than doing nothing at all. The vaccine + colostrum group did equally well as colostrum alone.

The highest incidence of flu (57 cases) were in the flu vaccine only group, not the "no treatment" group which had 41 cases of flu.

In the second part of the study colostrum was twice as effective as the flu vaccine (3 on colostrum vs 6 with the vaccine) and 1 patient died from complications of the flu in the vaccine group.

Other prevention measures - Allimax garlic, Gastrointestinal (GI) cleanse, probiotics, vitamin C and/or MediHerb Echinacea Premium (alternating 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off).

There's a new recipe for Newfoundland Cod Cakes on our website, to view it click here.