Poop transplants

I’m not a fan of antibiotics; they’re used too frequently and serve only to strengthen the colonies of bacteria they’re supposed to eliminate.

I’m also not a fan of the overweening reach of Big Pharma and Agriculture; those industries have money and lobbying leverage that allow them to distribute drugs and foods to the market that haven’t been properly tested.

These are bold claims to make and, while there’s plenty of information to substantiate the allegations, today isn’t my day to provide it. Instead, here’s a short, but amusing, video that touches on both subjects while suggesting a fascinating solution to some intestinal difficulties.

I believe poop could be used to treat more than just digestive problems. We  just need to wait for the science to catch up.

A good liver detox can be really bad for your health

I have a number of clients who’ve heard about the benefits of going on a liver detox and want to know how to go about doing a juice fast.  For most of them I suggest working on their diets instead.

When you go on a detox, the purpose of it is to release any toxins that have been stored in your body so that they can be processed for elimination.  The objective is to make you feel more alive, have more energy and generally shine brighter. But the process is going to release some toxins, and that may give you a headache, or make you feel dizzy, or affect your concentration, along the way. But hey, it’s worth it.  After detoxing your liver, your skin will be healthier, your brain will work more efficiently, you’ll have oodles of energy.  You’ll feel invigorated.  You’ll feel fantastic. As unlimited as a child.

However, it’s a bad idea to go on any kind of fast or detox if you’re going to be releasing more toxic junk into your system than your body is able to deal with.  If you’re not eating well in the first place, a detox will release all the by-products that have accumulated as a result of your poor diet.  And if you weren’t eating well, you won’t exactly have been stocking up on the nutrients that you’ll need to help detoxify that junk.

If you have a poor diet, you’re probably not feeling as good as you could be, and a detox will just make you feel worse.

So what should you do instead?  Sort out your diet, and then consider a detox.  If you still feel you need one.  While improving your diet is easier if you have help, there are several steps that you can take on your own.  See yesterday’s blog on how to go from feeling rubbish to feeling fantastic for ideas.

If you’d like a reminder of what happens when you don’t look after your liver, watch this parody of the Dove Evolution advert:

Diet drinks and snacks are killing you. Really.

It pains me to see people I love eating things that are slowly killing them.  But I’ve learnt over the years that my loving, caring, earnest, helpful, informed advice comes across as interfering, opinionated, know-it-all judgement.  As they say, the worst advice is that which is unsought.  So I tend to keep my mouth shut.  Maybe too much, but at least people are more likely to talk to me!

However, today is the day that I mouth off on a blog!

Today’s inner distress is caused by seeing a loved one eating low-carb snack bars sweetened with artificial sweeteners.  Artificial sweeteners are everywhere: not just low-carb snack bars, but also diet drinks, diet yoghurts, fruit squash and a thousand other places.  Artificial sweeteners are poisons.  They’re bad for your liver (see my previous article on “How to make your liver cry”) and they confuse the body.  They can also contribute to weight gain – an irony, since most people consume them in order to lose weight.  These chemicals kill you slowly.  If you got fatally sick immediately after eating them, you’d stop.  The action of the artificial sweeteners is slower than that, but no less drastic.

There are currently 3 main artificial sweeteners being used in our food: aspartame (Nutrasweet), sucralose (Splenda) and acesulfame K (potassium).   They cause headaches, dizziness, joint pain, sleep problems, depression, memory loss, nausea, hives, skin swelling and itching, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, convulsions, abdominal cramps, fatigue and diarrhoea, amongst many other things.  Aspartame also breaks down into diketopiperazine (a carcinogen) and formaldehyde (used in paint remover and embalming fluid, a carcinogen known specifically to increase likelihood of breast and prostate cancers).  Sucralose has never been proven safe for human consumption.  If you’re confused as to how chemicals so bad could be allowed into our food, you can read about the politics here, here and here. 

So now that you know that artificial sweeteners are bad, bad, bad, what can you have instead?  I believe that you’re most likely to be healthy if you gradually change your taste buds so that you don’t need sugar at all.  And then, when you do have it, enjoy it.

When I tell people this, they think I’m doing the nerdy, holier-than-thou, nutritional therapist thing, telling them that they can never have sugar again.  That’s absolutely not the case.  I’m not suggesting that you should be obsessive and never eat anything sweet again.  I’m suggesting that you remove sweet breakfasts (click here to find out how.  Did you know that a bowl of cereal has more sugar than 5 chocolate biscuits?) and sweet snacks from your day, but that you can still enjoy a small amount of something sweet after one of your meals.  You won’t need or want much.  A couple of squares of chocolate will satisfy you.  It may seem impossible, but it’s true.

If you take out all the unnecessary sugar from your day, you won’t be dependent on it.  Sugar is considered to be one of the most addictive substances around, more addictive than cocaine!  While you have lots of it, you need to have even more.  But if you lose the addiction and dependency, you won’t need it any more and you won’t feel deprived.  What’s more, you’ll be able to hear what your body is telling you.  We all have the ability to listen to our bodies and give them exactly what they need, but few of us do.  Mostly that’s because the noise from the sugar craving is too loud and is drowning it out.

Once free of the dependency of sugar, you’ll have more energy, better mental function, a clearer head, better balanced hormones, more stable mood, better skin, more efficient digestive system, stronger immunity and your body will find its own perfect weight.  It really is worth making the change.

Don’t take my word for it.  Challenge yourself to remove the sugar from your diet and see how it feels.  It will take only 7 to 10 days to feel fantastic.  But you’ll only know if you have a go.  It’s worked for my clients.  It will work for you.

A warning; if you currently eat a lot of sugar, the withdrawal symptoms will last for approximately 3 days.  You’ll feel irritable, miserable and lacking in energy.  You may have headaches and poor sleep.  But it’s only for 3 days and it’s completely normal.  And the benefits are amazing.  It’s worth it.

And rather than dying a slow, painful death from the sympoms caused by artificial sweetener poisoning, you can live a full, energetic, vibrant life.

A breakfast for champions

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  We all know that.  If you don’t have a good breakfast, you’ll be exhausted and you won’t perform at your best.

Your concentration will be poor, your memory will be compromised, you’ll be irritable, and you might suffer with headaches.  But how does knowing that breakfast is important translate into action?  Does that mean that you should eat something, as opposed to nothing?  Or eat more cereal, so that you can keep going for longer? Or eat cereal and toast?

Well, eating something, rather than nothing, is a definite step in the right direction, but there’s more to it than just that.  And it’s not the quantity that fuels your day, it’s the quality.    Breakfast breaks the overnight fast, and your blood sugar levels will have dropped.  It’s important to eat a breakfast that will stabilise your blood sugar at a level that’s healthy and sustainable.  The way to do that is to have some fibre, in the form of a wholegrain, and some protein.  White toast and jam just isn’t going to do it for you.  There’s no fibre and no protein.  Even more slices of white toast and jam won’t make it any better.  In fact, that kind of breakfast will increase your blood sugar to a level that’s too high, and you’ll end up crashing within an hour, feeling washed out and unable to perform.

Instead, swap the white toast for wholegrain, and add something more substantial.  Some great protein options to add to your toast that are easy and fast in the morning, are:

• scrambled eggs (they really don’t take any longer to cook than the bread takes to toast)
• peanut butter
• cheese
• baked beans (low sugar)
• kippers
• ham or chicken

If you like cereal for breakfast, you need to know what you’re eating.  Some cereals have the equivalent of 5 teaspoons of sugar in them, per bowl.  That’s way too much sugar in the morning, and will trigger a rollercoaster of blood sugar highs and lows, leaving you exhausted and lacking in energy.

• Swap to a low- or zero-sugar cereal instead.
• Weetabix has no sugar at all, while Oatibix has relatively little.
• There are many sugar-free mueslis available in the supermarkets too.
• Porridge is another option.  To sweeten porridge, you could blend some berries and stir them in.
• And with all of these breakfast options, add seeds and nuts.  Seeds and nuts are great stores of protein, and taste fabulous with cereals and porridge.

You could also consider making your own smoothie.  Innocent smoothies are lovely, but they contain fruit, fruit and more fruit, with no protein.  If you have a blender (hand or worktop), it’s easy to make your own, high-protein smoothie:

• Add a good handful of berries to a pint glass.
• Add some milk (dairy or soya) to cover the berries and blend until liquid.
• Add approximately 1 dessertspoon of seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, sesame, and/or flax) and another dessertspoon of nuts (peanuts, pecans, almonds, walnuts).
• Add half a banana and some more milk or yoghurt, and blend until smooth.  If it’s too thick, add more milk.  If it’s too thin, add more yoghurt.
• You can vary the fruit according to what’s in season.  Half a banana is great for the texture so worth keeping, but you can swap the berries for an apple or kiwis or plums, or whatever you can find.

I’ve found with my clients, that if they’re normally cereal eaters, they don’t like the taste of sugar-free cereals after the high-sugar ones.  If you’re one of those people, then don’t bother with these cereal ideas.  Instead, experiment with the toast alternatives.

Try eating a well in the morning for 2 weeks.  And see how a good breakfast can turn you into a champion.

How to make your liver cry

This video is about a man who put a McDonald’s hamburger in his jacket pocket and then forgot about it.  For a year.  And when he found it in his jacket pocket a year later, it looked exactly the same as when he first bought it.

Good food doesn’t do that.  Good food goes bad.  These hamburgers are full of chemicals that preserve food unnaturally, and those chemicals don’t belong in our bodies.  It’s our poor, overworked livers that have to deal with the chemicals, and what most people don’t realise is that many of the compounds in our food today can’t be metabolised.  If there isn’t a pathway available to the liver to process a chemical, it can’t get out of our bodies.  Instead it gets stored as fat.  An excess of these chemicals leads to symptoms of overload.  And overload looks very familiar to many people: headaches, skin problems, low energy, sluggish digestion, constipation, intolerances, PMS, joint pain, nausea, depression.

A simple way to improve your health is to avoid foods that contain ingredients that belong in a chemistry lab.  And give your liver a break.