My green fresh bags from Norpro kept my garden spinach crisp and nice for three weeks or more. I actually lost it in the refrigerator, dug it out preparing to throw the spinach away and it was all perfect. I had not washed the spinach and the roots were attached which helped keep it going but those Norpro bags are the best and can be washed and reused many times for produce.

http://bit.ly/SbPRI

My mind is swirling this morning thanks to the “cash for clunkers” program (www.cars.gov) our government put in place as an incentive to get clunkers, i.e. cars with low gas mileage, off the road. We signed up because we have a 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee which does not have a good mpg reputation.All was well until yesterday when we discovered that a screw up by the state of Minnesota may well put us out of the running (if you will allow me to call it that as it is a bit of a rat race).
It isn’t good enough for the feds that we have registrations dating back to the year we bought the car or that we have the title and insurance to prove we have owned the car for 10 years, nope we have to have the registration from the period 10/2007-10/2008 which just happens to be the period of time that someone or something in St. Paul decided we had junked both of our current vehicles and didn’t send out a reminder to pay our tabs. Luckily my spousal unit is on top of things, so he called asking about the lack of notice to pay our tabs, spent hours on the phone dealing with our county employee who in turn had to deal with “State” as she put it. Finally it was decided that the state had made a, ahem, MISTAKE! We got our title and the tabs after some time but, guess what? We never got the registration and my guess is as good as yours where that thing will be found or if it will ever be found. Go! big government Go!

Feeding Your Thyroid

My latest update on Facebook from Janie Bowthorpe was basically a continuation of her disagreement with Forest Pharmaceuticals and their changing the formulation of Armour Thyroid and Janie’s successfully getting many people to switch to Naturethroid and Westhroid. It is all getting old to me and I will apologize right now to any readers that offends and tell you that I am grateful to Janie Bowthorpe for her very informative book Stop The Thyroid Madness. I have a different take on the subject of the new formulation causing relapse in everyone and I will share it with my readers.

Early this winter I finally talked my very open minded doctor, Rob Bruley, in to prescribing Armour Thyroid instead of my compounded pharmaceutical T3 and T4 because we were not resolving my hypothyroidism issue after more than a year of constantly increasing my dosage. Admittedly he reluctantly did it, but he did it and told me I had to take a 3 grain dose of Armour Thyroid which by the way had to be special ordered at Target pharmacy (I tell you because it is useful information). 3 grains was equal to the T3 and T4 I was taking that wasn’t working very well although we had corrected several aspects of my thyroid malfunction. At that time I also started a bio-identical testosterone cream and progesterone tablet because those hormones were low in a recent hormone test I had taken.

I don’t want to quote exact times here because it is all a blur of history but approximately 6 weeks later I was having heart palpitations and sudden jolts that would awaken me in the middle of the night. I started taking half a 3 grain tablet at that time and when I called Dr. Bruley he agreed that this was the right thing to do, so he prescribed a blood test  which showed my T3 was now too high, T4 was okay and the TSH was within range although on the low side. I continued on 1 1/2 grains and when I had the next blood test I didn’t take my Armour the morning of the test as it will affect the T3 reading according to Janie and I was not in the mood to take any higher dosage. I was now feeling rather hyper at times and for instance if I was writing something it would almost look scribbled because I was writing too fast (my own test) so I knew I was a little over medicated but the test would tell.

That test came back with both T3 and T4 within range but my total TSH was .3 which indicates suppressed thyroid. I have since cut my half tablet in to half which amounts to 3/4 grain of Armour Thyroid. I will need a blood test in a few weeks but I can tell you that I still feel a little hyperthyroid. On 3/4 grain my heart palpitations are almost non-existent but at times I feel agitated like I need to run a marathon but I don’t run anymore.

Now to my point, the newly formulated Armour has seemingly corrected my thyroid problem greatly reducing my need for thyroid stimulating hormone. I don’t take it sublingually anymore because most of my digestive issues are resolved by not eating grain of any kind and drinking kefir every day. Swallowing Armour allows for slow release of the thyroid stimulating hormone. If and when I did what Janie suggested and took the tablet sublingually I would get a jolt in the morning that was uncomfortable and if I took some early afternoon when it had worn off I was too hyper to relax by bedtime. Swallowing it with my morning tea works perfectly for me I have sustained energy during the day and I am ready for bed at night.

I am now taking Alpha Lipoic Acid (300 mg) twice a day (with breakfast and supper) as well as a B-Complex vitamin for energy and liver health. If you take ALA you must add a B Complex as the ALA lowers your levels of the B vitamins. I also take 200 mcg of a sodium selenate/selenomethionine supplement. When I feel an energy lag I have a great B12 supplement called ProBoneO by Life Enhancement (Dr. Wright). I eat a diet free of gluten, with lots of greens, fresh eggs, avocados, grass fed meat, etc. My conclusion is that by balancing my hormones and taking the right supplements (no excipients or fillers), following a gluten free diet and staying away from excititoxins I am healing my thyroid.

Instead of complaining about the reformulation of Armour Thyroid I would tell you to try it. If it doesn’t work or you start to experience hypo symptoms again follow this advice before you change to Naturethroid or Westhroid:

Balance all your hormones not just your thyroid hormone.

Eat a gluten free diet full of greens which can be from Barley grass and Alfalfa grass or greens from the garden that are raw or lightly steamed. Add homemade kefir with no sugar added for a health gut.

Throw away supplements that have excipients and fillers as they negatively affect your immune system and create a bio film that keeps you from absorbing the supplement.

Judiciously stay away from MSG which means making your own fresh food with no boxed convenience foods and reading The MSG Myth.

Exercise using the T-Tapp method as she concentrates on cleaning your lymph system and allowing your body to heal itself.

If you do all these things and still suffer from hypo symptoms then it is time to try something new. If you choose not to try these steps first don’t cry foul on Forest Pharmaceuticals point your finger at the real guilty party, you.

Saturday mornings are made for going to the Farmer’s Market. In St. Paul Minnesota it is hard to find organically grown produce, so I had to ask the question “Do you use pesticides on your produce?” Many do some are trying very hard to do sustainable farming, so I settled with the sustainable farmers, meaning they used only herbicides on the potatoes for my husband. On the other hand the fresh eggs are to die for and I even bought raw milk Parmesan cheese from Eichtens as well as yummy looking freshly made balls of mozzarella (“first of the season”). I was hungry for roast chicken and Callister’s supplied me with fresh whole chicken to be baked Diavolo style on Monday. !5 minutes in and out and I think we are set for the week as I can pick produce every day right in my very own garden where there are neither pesticides or herbicides used just lots of hard labor. To quote Julia “Bon Appetit” and have a great weekend.

I am up and eating my morning smoothie with sunshine on my shoulders and quite honestly in my eyes. This morning’s smoothie was made thicker and more protein rich with Pea Protein from http://www.Mercola.com Pea Protein can be high in excitotoxins, so we shall see how it affects me but it did make the smoothie quite satisfyingly thick.

First,I wanted to point out the reply from Marie Flowers regarding Vitamin D, safe removal of amalgams in Minnesota as this invaluable information and appears under the Pre-Conception Healthcare entry.
Next, I wanted to let my readers know that this is an interactive site and all comments are welcome and appreciated. There is so much information out there that we all need to know and this medium is one way to share it.
Todays tidbit is Alpha Lipoic Acid. ALA is an amazing nutraceutical which is capable of regenerating liver tissue in particular. When used intravenously in combination with oral Selenium and Silymarin it has reversed damage done by Hepatitis C but even used alone it has reversed damage done by eating poison mushrooms. Dr. Burt Berkson recommends 300mg twice a day complimented by a B complex vitamin to be taken by healthy people. Dr. Berkson does warn that not all supplements are equal and some are not pure. At the moment he recommends Metabolic Maintenance as the best of the bunch. If you want more information check out this interview by a Julie Schopick :
http://www.honestmedicine.com/2009/03/burt-berkson-md-phd-talks-with-honest-medicine-about-his-work-and-our-medical-system-the-interview-t.html

“Pre-Conception Healthcare”

If you are thinking about getting pregnant having a complete blood panel done BEFORE you get pregnant may be the best thing you can do to assure a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. In fact, many holistic physicians feel a complete physical should be required before you become pregnant as well as testing for metal toxicity, molds, electromagnetic fields and STD testing.

Let’s start with the most important test first. You should have your Thyroid tested. This does not mean getting just a TSH reading this means getting a complete thyroid panel including Free T3 and Free T4. Hypothyroidism in an expectant mother can lead to miscarriage of the fetus, a lower IQ of the child as they grow and potentially Down’s Syndrome.

Correcting your hypothyroid condition may be as simple as correcting underfunctioning adrenal glands (can be checked with a saliva hormone test) as according to Joe Mercola it is often the cause of an under functioning thyroid gland. If adrenal health is adequate but your T3 and T4 are not normal or your TSH is higher than a reading of 2 (normal is between 1 and 2)then you may need to take Dessicated Thyroid (Armour, Nature-Throid, Westhroid) but under most circumstances do not fall for the advice to take synthetic T4 only (Synthroid, or the generic Levothyroxine) as it has been my experience that that is a slippery slope to taking more and more thyroid medication with no possibility of resolution or improvement.

Next have your Vitamin D3 (25 OH(D)) levels tested. You should have a level near or exceeding 50 ng/ml to stay healthy and provide an environment that is healthy for the fetus to develop in. It is thought in certain circles that low Vitamin D3 levels in the mother could lead to autism in the baby and this would not be noticed until the child is nearing their third birthday.

If your levels are low it may be prescribed by your physician that you take doses up to 50,000 mg until your levels are 50 ng/ml or above. These are hefty doses and are generally only taken over a few months, a week at a time until your levels are normal. If your levels are low do not attempt to get pregnant until your levels are at least 50 ng/ml and do not take these high doses without a physician monitoring your D levels.

Toxins are a very real threat to the health of your unborn child Mercury being chief among these toxins that can harm your fetus.  There are tests for heavy metal toxicity and if you have amalgam fillings you should have these safely removed and replaced before considering pregnancy.

Should tests for metal toxicity show that you have toxic levels you need to know the metals that you have accumulated and then follow detoxification protocol including removal of silver fillings. Taking chlorella, drinking Cilantro tea or taking Cilantro tincture is an easy thing to do and will cause your body to get rid of the heavy metals. Far Infrared Sauna will also aid the detoxification process and allows the toxins to exit via your skin instead of poisoning your already challenged liver.

Dr. Deitrich Klinghardt recommends an Electro-magnetic field test before getting pregnant. This means testing the areas where you sleep and work for EM fields and protecting yourself from the affects of EMFs. He recommends turning the fuses off to the electricity in your bedroom at night, he will not allow cordless phones in the homes of his patients planning on becoming pregnant and feels strongly that exposing the unborn fetus to undue EMF stress is a huge contributor to behavioral problems in children not to mention cancers and other devastating problems. He does recommend a netting that can be put around your bed much like a mosquito netting that will stop the onslaught of EMF waves which sounds exotic to me but I can see the benefit since I have a “techy” husband who will not turn off the cell phones at night and leaves them by his side at all times not to mention the cordless phones that dot our countertops throughout the house.

It all sounds terribly difficult but it is not impossible and going in to your pregnancy with a healthy body could and will save you years and years of problems or perhaps better said, challenges with your as of now unborn, hopefully unconceived child. You really must dare to conceive the inconceivable.

Boning Up on the Facts

I hope my friend Carla won’t mind if I take a cue from her for today’s blog but she was pondering osteoporosis and its affects on her aging mother. I have osteopenia which means when I had my Dexa scan done there was some thinning of my bone but not enough for my functional medicine doctor to concern himself with. To quote him ” it is a normal thinning of bone”. My mother had osteoporosis and this was evidenced by the change in her general height. That said, she really never did break a bone until she was 90, and she fell more than any other person I know. When she did tumble from her walker at the nursing home she fell right on her left elbow and it did break. It was surgically corrected, and once they took the darned pin out it healed and she acted like she had never had a break. Mother started taking one of the Pharma drugs in her 80’s and it may have helped but it also may have contributed to some wasting in her jaw bone that caused her to lose some teeth. I guess we will never know and that is what the Pharma world counts on. I am left pondering my mother’s osteoporosis thanks to Carla and here are my ruminations.

I believe that my osteopenia and my mother’s osteoporosis were primarily caused by undiagnosed Celiac’s disease. We were a family of bread eaters and cereals, you name it there wasn’t a grain that wasn’t eaten at our house all in the name of healthy eating. Mother had the ability to clear her colon in seconds as her doctor told her “with any kind of stress”. I think we would now call that IBS and mother had it her entire life but not one person thought to alter her diet. I think of all the nutrients she didn’t absorb and I am no longer in wonder at her osteoporosis or for that matter her dementia. I have blamed my similar issues on anything and everything, that is until I started reading and then took to heart everything that Joe Mercola and others were putting out there about grain consumption. Once I eliminated grain from my diet, allowing for the occasional treat, my digestive issues all but disappeared.

Calcium is supposed to build strong bones. Well milk was huge at our house and mother dutifully drank her glass of milk at almost every meal ostensibly “for her bones”. Mother also took her tums. Pasteurized milk is truly useless and that “healthy” drink, skim milk, is just pure sugar and does little more than cause insulin resistance in the individuals who drink it (my father drank gallons of the stuff but ate no sweets and little bread and died with undiagnosed diabetes). In other words, calcium is not the only answer and most of us get plenty of calcium in our diet from various vegetables and if not lactose intolerant from cheese, cottage cheese, etc. What is often is missing is Magnesium to balance the calcium intake and Ionic Fizz and Peter Gilham’s Calm both easily add magnesium to your diet. I love my raw milk kefir and have some most mornings in my smoothie. By the way, there is no pasteurized milk in my house if I can help it but that is a recent revelation (last 10 years) and pasteurized skim milk used to be a constant in our refrigerator and I, too, took Tums regularly.

Mother exercised in her fifties but only then and it was always walking. She worked harder than anyone I know and had more energy than anyone I know but she didn’t actually do weight lifting or any kind of exercise that would cause percussion of the bone and a pulling of muscle on the bones. Lesson learned is exercise your muscles and pound a little on your bones with exercise like running, walking, climbing stairs, etc. T-Tapp actually does it all and also improves your mirror image.

Mom ate a lot of fish especially in her later years as they lived on the shores of Lake Superior but fish is notoriously high in mercury and she was still eating her oatmeal and bread, so whatever goodness she was supposed to get from her fish was washed down the loo. Omega 3 oils are vital to healthy bones and the best kind of fish oil I know of is Vital Choice Salmon Oil. It is a deep orange it is so rich in astaxanthan from krill, has a pure taste and is undistilled and has undetectable levels of mercury.  Omega 6 oils need to be minimized at least in the summer (we may have increased need for some if we live in the northern climes).

Mother judiciously avoided sunshine. She slathered on sunscreen, put a large brimmed hat on her head and covered every inch of her body with thick fabric. In her last years she was seldom exposed to sunshine and when she was she squinted and asked to go back inside. I never had her Vitamin D levels checked but I wish I would have as it is easy to do and is so important. Vitamin D levels should be at least 50-60 ng/ml and even higher if you have any health challenges like cancer or even a virus. My functional medicine doctor ordered the test for me originally but now you can order your own online at the Vitamin D Council site. It is so cool that at my local Healtheast hospital (Woodwinds) you can walk in to the hospital lab and ask for a Vitamin D3 test without doctor’s orders and for $40 find out for yourself. It may be true of a lab near you and it pays to ask. Once you know your D3 levels you may need massive amounts of D3 to get your levels up (up to 50,000 mg temporarily) but you might just need daily exposure to midday sunshine. Sunshine prescription: 15-20 minutes midday sun on as much exposed naked skin as you can decently manage. In the north our sunshine is only effective from May-September unless you live at high altitude so another option is the Sunsplash from Mercola not only will it help your body produce its own Vitamin D all year you will also walk around with a healthy glow.

Lastly, Mom took a daily multiple vitamin but we know now those really aren’t adequate and with her digestive issues it was mostly a waste of her time and money. What she really needed were a host of minerals and vitamins that would have helped her keep her bones strong. Vitamin K2 is vital, selenium, boron, copper, zinc and B12 (a vitamin many of us have unhealthily low levels of) are all necessary to build and keep bone strong. Recently, I found quite by accident a product developed by Jonathon Wright called ProBone-O by Life Enhancement. It has no fillers or magnesium stearate and is easy to use as you just drop it in the vestibule of your mouth, let it sit 20 seconds and then swallow, even the digestively challenged will absorb the nutrients.

I can’t change things for my mom as she died in March at the age of 91 but maybe my ruminations can help you or someone you love. All of the experts I mention have numerous articles about bone health on their websites and they have all proven to be quite reliable. It really is up to you to bone up on your health.

Dizzying Facts

I just saw “getting dizzy from kefir” as a “search” on Google and thought it might be worth mentioning that when someone has yeast overgrowth or overgrowth of Candida they can feel dizzy from nearly anything containing sugar and kefir has lactose although not as much as a cup of unfermented pasteurized milk.
I had a friend who took a couple of sips of Kombucha and acted and felt quite inebriated. Kombucha and Kefir have a tiny amount of alcohol but around 1% as a product of their fermentation. It’s not enough to ever make you feel dizzy without precipitating factors, factors like Candida overgrowth.
People have been accused of being drunk and even arrested for “DUI” who never had a drop of alcohol but anything containing carbohydrates that they ate or drank was quickly converted to fuel for the yeasts that they had prolifically growing in their bodies and they were left “drunk” by the well fed yeasts according to the book  “The Yeast Syndrome” by John Parks Trowbridge M.D. and Morton Walker, D.P. M..
What to do? Treat the yeast and then control the yeast with a low carb diet like Joe Mercola suggests in his book “Take Control of Your Health”. Candida is a normal component of your gut but it can become a problem. How do you know if it is a problem? Have you ever had a “yeast” infection? You may have yeast overgrowth and you may have had it from birth as it is transferred from mother to her baby. All it takes is a blow to your immune system (like a 10 day round of antibiotics) and the yeasts grow, become a problem and leave you feeling dizzy for your sugar lust.