Sugar and Your Immune System

Your body has a very efficient system for protecting itself from outside “invaders” such as viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc. The single most important part of this system is the body’s ability to identify and destroy any invaders that get inside.

There is a fact that you may not know about your body’s immune system:

EATING ANY KIND OF SUGAR HAS THE POTENTIAL TO REDUCE YOUR BODY’S DEFENSES BY 75% OR MORE FOR FOUR TO SIX HOURS.

This is not new data. In the 1970’s Dr. Linus Pauling (one of the greatest researchers in the field of microbiology) discovered that vitamin C helps the body to combat the common cold. As part of the same research, Dr. Pauling found that sugar severely slows down this same process.

This is very important to know, as using this information can prevent illness and dramatically assist healing. Because the idea that sugar is “bad” for you is so controversial, I am going to give you a quick, simplified tour through your own immune system so you can see for yourself what Dr. Pauling discovered.

1. How Your Body Disposes Of Invaders

Bacteria, viruses, etc. are literally “swallowed” by a special type of cell called a “phagocyte.” This is a cell, such as a white blood cell, that engulfs and absorbs waste material, harmful microorganisms, or other foreign bodies in the bloodstream and tissues.

2. Vitamin C

Dr. Pauling discovered that vitamin C is needed by white blood cells to engulf and absorb viruses and bacteria. In fact, a white blood cell has to contain 50 times the concentration of vitamin C as would normally be found in the blood around it. That’s how Dr. Pauling came up with the “take vitamin C for a cold” theory. In order to continue to destroy bacteria and viruses, the white blood cells have to accumulate vitamin C all the time to keep up the 50-times concentration. So, vitamin C is being moved through the cell membranes into the white blood cells all over your body, all the time. That’s why it’s important to have plenty of vitamin C available to your body.

3. Sugar

Glucose (sugar in its simplest form, as found in the blood stream) and vitamin C have a similar chemical structure. So similar, in fact, that when a white blood cell tries to pull in more vitamin C from the blood around it, glucose can get substituted by mistake. If the concentration of glucose in the blood goes beyond a certain concentration, the white blood cell’s 50-times vitamin C concentration can start to drop because of the large amount of glucose it’s pulling in as a substitute for vitamin C.

In fact, at a blood sugar level of 120, the white blood cell’s ability to absorb and destroy viruses and bacteria is reduced by 75%. This blood sugar level would be easily obtained by any normal person eating some sugar (cake, cookies, candy, soda or even drinking fruit juice). Further, it can take four to six hours for the vitamin C concentration in the white blood cells to reach that optimum 50-times concentration again.

Conclusion

As you can see, it’s not a great idea to eat any kind of sugar if you’re sick, including the much-recommended orange juice (which may contain vitamin C, but this won’t help if the white blood cells can’t get past the sugar to use it!). Further, if you were on a program of health improvement of any kind, sugar would be your number-1 enemy! No matter if you’re healing from an injury, either. White blood cells and other phagocytes remove dead tissue as well as other types of waste associated with injury healing.

Talk to us about how to avoid sugar and some really great sugar substitutes you can use! And the next time you go to the drug store and notice that the cough syrup contains mostly sugar, you can wonder as we do what happened to this valuable research that no one seems to know?

More Information

Read these articles for more information on improving your health:

The Physics of Pain

There is a physics of the nervous system that explains long-term or chronic pain.

If you are suffering from this kind of pain, usually you just want it to stop. You aren’t likely to care overly much about physics.

However, you should know that understanding the physics can lead to “just getting it to stop.”

Standing Waves

Remember from physics how a wave looks? It’s a big “S” on its side. As time progresses, the energy goes up, then comes down, then goes up again.

If the wave hits something that reflects it back, you get an echo. But if the return wave exactly matches the original wave as it returns, you get something wonderful and weird called a “standing wave.”

It’s as if the wave isn’t moving. The high energy point stays in the same place, as does the low energy point.

We’ve all experienced this at a stoplight. The guy pulls up next to you with the subwoofers so massive that his suspension is bottoming out. Suddenly, your car is shaking. Your body is shaking. Your teeth are shaking.

You’re experiencing a standing wave.

Your Nervous System and Energy

“Standing Waves” in the nervous system

Your nervous system is a conductor of energy. This energy, which contains coded information your body needs to operate, moves back and forth across the nerves all over your body, all the time.

An impact or injury anywhere in your body can cause a system overload. If this overload creates a barrier to nervous system energy, it can change the length of the path that energy will travel before it’s “answered back” in the system. This can cause a nervous system standing wave.

Impact and injuries can set up a standing wave of energy in your nervous system.

Like the subwoofers in the next car, this energy overload can get very uncomfortable and can be a cause of pain. Because the overload can prevent normal nerve communication, you can have slow healing and long-term pain.

Wrong Solutions

With its concentration on pharmaceuticals, medicine believes that the answer to pain is using drugs to block nerve conduction. Drugs temporarily stop the pain, but the stress on the nervous system may worsen the standing wave problem. In most cases, if you stop the medication, you continue the pain.

Solving the Problem

Once you have a basic understanding of the physics involved, you can see that the solution would be to bleed off the excess energy from the standing wave so healing can occur.

Success with this involves an entirely different point of view from traditional medicine.

Medicine’s viewpoint is that “the body is doing something wrong (hurting), so we need to stop it from doing that wrong thing (medicate it).”

A better view would be, “the body is intelligent and can heal itself with a bit of assistance, as long as the assistance is what the body wants, not what some “expert” thinks it wants.”

The Army’s Solution

Dr. Aaron Cook performs an acupuncture procedure on Jackenson Pierre Propeta on hospital ship USNS Comfort. (DoD photo by Spc. Nashaunda Tilghman)

Few organizations are faced with as much of a pain problem as the US Army. After tremendous difficulties with addiction, accidents caused by soldiers impaired with painkillers, and death from overdoses, the Army was willing to try anything as long as it worked.

What they settled on was acupuncture.

Acupuncture is a process of communicating with the body and helping it to re-route and balance nervous system energy.

With acupuncture, there are no drugs, no addiction, and no side effects. And in many cases, acupuncture provided more significant pain relief than drugs.

Acupuncture Patching

Homeopathic Acupuncture Patch

At my clinic, we use homeopathic patches placed on acupuncture points to balance nervous system energy and reduce pain.

The patches absorb the body’s infrared radiation and convert it to a specific light wavelength, stimulating the acupuncture point where the patch is applied. The patches are extremely effective at bleeding off excess nervous system energy. Rebalancing the nervous system this way breaks up the standing waves causing pain.

“Patching” is one example of how we assist the body’s intelligence to heal based on testing rather than on guessing.

Patient Success with Homeopathic Patches

I had a crazy neck pain for about a week that wouldn’t go away with heat, massage, soaking or my infrared blanket. One day with Dr. Billiot’s little patches on two key points of my body and the pain disappeared. –J.S.

What do the numbers 3,4, 8, and 9 have to do with your health and wellness?

Ronald Grisanti D.C., D.A.B.C.O., DACBN, MS, CFMP

Do you know those little stickers on fruits and veggies? They’re called price look-up (PLU) codes, and they contain numbers that cashiers use to ring you up. But you can also use them to make sure you’re getting what you paid for. If you are interested in staying healthy, here’s what to look for:

• A five-digit number that starts with a 9  means the item is organic.Eating organically grown produce is paramount. This can be identified at the grocery store by a five-digit bar code starting with the number “9,” or purchased from your local organic grower.
• A four-digit code beginning with a 3 or a 4 means the produce is probably conventionally grown. For example, regular small lemons sold in the U.S. are labeled 4033, large are 4053; small organic lemons are coded 94033, large are 94053. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of food quality when it comes to the prevention of disease. Sure, a conventionally grown bell pepper (identified by a sticker with a four-digit bar code starting with the number “4”) will contain the healthy compound beta-cryptoxanthin, but it will also come with a whole host of cancer-causing chemicals on it.
• A five-digit code that starts with an 8 means the item is genetically modified (it has genes from other organisms). You won’t see many of those because only genetically modified versions of corn, soybeans, canola, cotton, papaya, and squash are now widely sold. And because PLU codes aren’t mandatory, companies can label those items as conventional.

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Introduction

There’s a children’s song, “Dry Bones” with lyrics that connect the bones of the skeleton:

The toe bone’s connected to the foot bone,
The foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone,
The ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone,
Now shake them skeleton bones!

Similarly, many other parts of the body are connected, some in surprising ways.

For example, did you know that the teeth are connected to the heart? Actually, your teeth (and gums) are connected to your overall systemic health.

The article below, “Periodontal Disease and C-Reactive Protein (CRP)” shows recent research linking gum disease to other inflammatory conditions.

“It is now evident that cardiac disorders are worsened by periodontitis*, both experimentally and in humans.”

Periodontitis: A common but preventable gum infection, usually caused by poor oral hygiene.

The good news? You can prevent and often improve gum disease yourself, just by brushing, flossing, and improving your diet.

Better news? Periodontitis (gum disease) leads to costly and uncomfortable dental work. You can improve your systemic health and avoid a $10,000 dental program all at the same time!

Signs You Need to Take Action:

• Swollen or puffy gums
• Bright red, dusky red, or purplish gums
• Gums that feel tender when touched
• Gums that bleed easily
• Pink-tinged toothbrush after brushing
• Spitting out blood when brushing or flossing your teeth
• Bad breath
• Pus between your teeth and gums
• Loose teeth or loss of teeth
• Painful chewing
• New spaces developing between your teeth
• Gums that pull away from your teeth (recede), making your teeth look longer than normal
• A change in the way your teeth fit together when you bite

Get Started Right Now

1: Throw away your toothbrush. Go get an inexpensive electric model that vibrates. Get several replacement brushes, and replace whenever you can see the brush is starting to “mush” a little.

2: Get a package of flossers. If you haven’t used these, you’ll be amazed at how fast and easy flossing is compared to the old “wrap around your fingers” technique.

3: Stop eating refined sugar, or reduce it in your diet as much as possible. This isn’t so much to save your teeth as to reduce inflammation and improve your immune response so your gums can heal. Read Sugar and Your Immune System to get a complete understanding.

4: Go to your dentist! The cheapest thing you can do for your dental health is getting your teeth professionally cleaned on a regular basis (your dentist will tell you how often you need to do it). Your dentist will also be able to tell you about your gum health and anything else you might need to do to get it under control.

Gum Disease can be a Symptom of Other Health Problems

Often I’ll talk to a patient who takes excellent care of their dental health but still has gum disease. Even more common are patients with gum disease that won’t improve no matter how much dental care they receive.

In this case, I could likely to help improve your health and ability to heal. This has often resulted in improved overall health and associated improvement in gum health.

Patient Stories:

When I went for my last appointment, the hygienist could not believe what she was seeing. She stopped cleaning and asked what in the world had I been doing to get my gums to do so well. No more deep pockets, and the gums were healthy enough to form new healthy tissue around the teeth. I just smiled and began telling her about Alternative Health Atlanta and the program. She again said, ‘I’ve never seen such improvement!’ –J.G.

After just a few weeks at Alternative Health Atlanta on an alternative health program, my next visit to the dentist was amazing. To the dentist’s surprise, the 6 probe measurement was now a 3! She asked me what I was doing, and I told her of my alternative health program. She stated that was good and that I should keep it up. And I didn’t need surgery. — W.G.

Find Out About Improving Your Health (and Dental Health)

Would you please take five minutes to fill out a health assessment survey and send it to me? I’ll call you for a phone consult and discuss what could be done about your health. It’s complimentary, no strings attached. Either I can help you or point you in the right direction to get help. Don’t give up! You can recover your health if you persist.

Periodontal Disease and C-Reactive Protein (CRP)

Ronald Grisanti D.C., D.A.B.C.O., DACBN, MS, CFMP

Periodontal (gum) disease is an infection of the tissues that hold your teeth in place. It’s typically caused by poor brushing and flossing habits that allow plaque—a sticky film of bacteria—to build up on the teeth and harden.

Periodontitis is a chronic inflammatory disease initiated by a bacterial biofilm called dental plaque, affecting both the periodontal ligaments and bone surrounding the teeth.

Signs and symptoms of periodontitis can include:

• Swollen or puffy gums
• Bright red, dusky red, or purplish gums
• Gums that feel tender when touched
• Gums that bleed easily
• Pink-tinged toothbrush after brushing
• Spitting out blood when brushing or flossing your teeth
• Bad breath
• Pus between your teeth and gums
• Loose teeth or loss of teeth
• Painful chewing
• New spaces developing between your teeth
• Gums that pull away from your teeth (recede), making your teeth look longer than normal
• A change in the way your teeth fit together when you bite

Relationship between periodontitis and C-Reactive Protein*

C-Reactive Protein (CRP): CRP increases in your blood when there’s inflammation in your body. It can be tested with a simple blood test. CRP shows if you have an infection and your risk of heart disease.

Many studies are showing an increase in CRP and periodontitis.

C-reactive protein (CRP) elevation is a part of the acute phase response to acute and chronic inflammation. Many clinical studies have shown that serum CRP levels were elevated in patients with chronic periodontitis. CRP levels increase to hundreds of μg/ml within hours following infection.

CRP and Increased Risk For Heart Disease (CVD) and Diabetes

In the last decades, several lines of evidence have supported the existence of a relationship between periodontitis and systemic health.

For instance, periodontitis acts within the same chronic inflammatory model seen in cardiovascular disease (CVD), or other disorders, such as diabetes.

It is now evident that cardiac disorders are worsened by periodontitis, both experimentally and in humans. For all these reasons, it is very plausible that preventing periodontitis impacts the onset or progression of CVD and diabetes.

It is recommended to be checked for periodontitis in the event you have an elevated CRP.

If you find you have periodontitis, it is necessary to see your dentist for immediate treatment.

The best way to prevent periodontitis is to follow a program of good oral hygiene.

• Good oral hygiene. That means brushing your teeth for two minutes at least twice daily — in the morning and before going to bed — and flossing at least once a day. Flossing before you brush allows you to clean away the loosened food particles and bacteria.
• Regular dental visits. See your dentist or dental hygienist regularly for cleanings, usually every six to 12 months.

Summary

If you have an elevated C-Reactive Protein, I recommend getting your teeth checked for periodontal (gum) disease.

6 Safe Grilling Tips– What You Need to Know

Ronald Grisanti D.C., D.A.B.C.O., DACBN, MS, CFMP

A popular pastime is the backyard grilling of our favorite meats.

Although millions enjoy grilling, this article will present some downsides and recommended action steps to ensure a good grilling experience.

The Downside of Grilling

Regularly eating grilled meats carries potential cancer risks.

Grilling causes meat to form carcinogenic compounds known as heterocyclic amines or HCAs. These are associated with increased cancer risk. The longer you cook the meat, the more HCAs are produced. Charred meat is a sign that a fair amount of HCAs has developed.

Grilling Strategies that can Reduce Your Cancer Risk

1: Cut meat into smaller portions, so they cook more quickly and have a shorter exposure to high cooking temperatures

2: Grilling leaner meats with less fat reduces the flames and smoke containing harmful hydrocarbons

3: Flip frequently. Fewer HCAs are formed if you turn the meat over frequently while grilling

4: Marinate! Marinating meat, poultry, or fish for at least 30 minutes before grilling can decrease the formation of HCAs by creating a barrier between the meat and the flames and smoke.

5: Control the temperature. To avoid cooking meats at high temperatures, light the outside burner(s) and leave the center burner off. Cook the food in the center of the grill.

6: If you’re cooking on charcoal, select hardwoods instead of softwoods. Types of wood can influence HCA formation. Hardwoods, such as hickory and maple, burn at lower temperatures than softwoods, such as pine. Cooking with wood that burns at a lower temperature is desirable.

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It often comes as a surprise to people, but these common oils (they seem to be in EVERYTHING!) can cause severe inflammation.

Inflammation is the fundamental cause of heart disease, digestive diseases, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, mental health issues, joint pain, arthritis and much more.

If you want to know why these diseases are rampant in our society, just visit your local grocery. Every inch of grocery store shelving has incredible value to the store and the suppliers of the products sold on that shelf. If you see 20 bottles of corn oil in a row, that tells you that this product flies off the shelves.

Side note: A solution to out-of-control health care costs in the US: Brick up both ends of the oils and cereal asiles in every grocery store in America. Health care costs would tank!

What Do I Use Instead?

Saturated fats are best to cook with: Butter, coconut, and palm oils. For lower temperature cooking and dressings, use extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil.

Be aware that restaurants usually use toxic seed oils and that the reheating of the oil that happens in fryers creates many toxic substances that become part of your meal. Moral: avoid deep-fried foods in restaurants.

See the article below for detailed information on Toxic Seed Oils

8 Toxic Seed Oils– What to Know

Ronald Grisanti D.C., D.A.B.C.O., DACBN, MS, CFMP

The eight industrial toxic seed oils are Canola, Corn, Cottonseed, Soy, Sunflower, Safflower, Grapeseed, and Rice bran.

Industrial seed oils are the highly processed oils extracted from soybeans, corn, rapeseed (canola), cottonseed and sunflower, and safflower seeds. After the seeds are gathered, they are heated to extremely high temperatures to oxidize the fatty acids. This process creates byproducts that are harmful to your health.

Omega-6s are found in corn, safflower, sunflower, soy, and vegetable oils and products made with those oils. Excess consumption of omega-6s can trigger the body to produce pro-inflammatory chemicals.

What’s wrong with industrial seed oils?

There are six main problems with industrial seed oils, all of which play a significant role in chronic inflammatory diseases.

The consumption of industrial seed oils represents an evolutionary mismatch.

Eating industrial seed oils raises our omega-6-to-omega-3 fatty acid ratios, with significant consequences for our health.

Industrial seed oils are unstable and oxidize easily.

They contain harmful additives.

They’re derived from genetically modified crops.

When industrial seed oils are repeatedly heated (as restaurants do in fryers), even more toxic byproducts are created.

How are industrial seed oils making us sick?

Industrial seed oils are far from the “healthy” label they carry. They have been linked to a number of chronic health problems such as:

• Asthma
• Autoimmune disease
• Cognitive and mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, cognitive decline, dementia, and even Alzheimer’s disease.
• Diabetes and obesity
• Heart disease (they are far from being heart-healthy!)
• Gut health issues such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBD) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBS)
• Inflammation
• Infertility
• Macular degeneration
• Osteoarthritis

The best thing you can do for your own health and your family’s health is to get rid of all vegetable oils and margarine from your home.  Simply throw them out. Replace them with saturated fats for cooking and extra virgin olive and avocado oil for dressing.

Summary:

At this point, it should be clear that we want to avoid omega-6 fats in our cooking oil. The following is a good graphic to represent what to avoid.

Oils from tropical plants such as cacao, coconut, and palm are lowest in omega-6, while oils from cold-weather plants such as sunflower and soybean are highest in omega-6 and best avoided.