Nutritional and Physical Degeneration is one of the most ground-breaking books ever written on the link between nutrition and health. Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist from Cleveland, became very disturbed by what he saw in his patients. He started to see a link between the decay he found in the mouths of his patients and pathologies found elsewhere in the body like diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, gastrointestinal complaints, and more. Dr. Price also found that crowded, crooked teeth were becoming more and more common, along with facial deformities like overbites, narrow faces, lack of well defined cheek bones, and underdevelopment of the nose. Dr. Price did not believe these problems to be in any way normal; He believed they were the result of poor nutrition. The worse a person’s diet was the more decay he found in their mouth. The more decay a person had in their mouth, the higher the rate of pathologies in other areas of the body.

More than 70 years ago Dr. Price decided to search the world for primitive people who lived entirely on indigenous foods. His travels took him from islands in the South Seas to Alaska to Africa and many places in between. He visited Australian Aborigines, Swiss villages, Eskimos, traditional American Indians, Amoazonian Indians, African tribes, and more. Dr. Price and his wife Florence traveled for ten years during the 1920’s and 30’s when groups of people completely isolated from civilization could be found.

Throughout his travels, Dr. Price kept a record of his findings with pictures and detailed assessments. What he found, to be called astounding, is an understatement. Dr, Price discovered that primitive people untouched by civilization, who subsided on a diet of indigenous food, had outstanding physical development with little to no dental problems, heart disease, diabetes, or any other diseases we know believe to be a normal consequence of life.

Dr. Price’s findings were not surprising to other investigators and explorers. However, the excepted explanation at the time was that primitive people were “racially pure” and that the maladies we see in civilization were due to “race mixing”. This theory was untenable to Dr. Price who found that the individuals in groups he studied who abandoned their traditional diets for foods provided by traders or missionaries, or who moved to a more civilized area were found to develop tooth decay and degenerative conditions.

The diets of these primitive groups of people were vastly different. Some were mostly cooked food while in others most of the food was consumed raw including animal sources. Some diets were based on sea food, others on domestic animals and others on wild game. Some diets were based on dairy while others consumed a variety of fruits and vegetables and grains.

The common thread between all the groups Dr. Price investigated was none of them contained any refined devitalized foods like white sugar, flour, pasteurized or skim milk, and refined or hydrogenated vegetable oils. All the diets contained animal foods of some type and some salt. Dr. Price analyzed the primitive diets and found they all contained four times the amount of water soluble vitamins and minerals, and ten times the amount of fat soluble vitamins compared to the modern American diet.

Unfortunately, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, the permanent record of his travels, is nonexistent to today’s modern medical community. This book is more important to our health and welfare today than it was 60 years ago. Our food supply, if it could be classified as food, is devoid of almost all nutritive value. We need to incorporate the fundamentals of primitive nutrition and return to nutrient dense whole food. We need to get back to local farming and turn away from manmade supermarket garbage that is destroying our health.

Anyone interested in becoming truly healthy needs to read Nutrition and physical degeneration

Ron Schmid, the author, is a naturopathic physician and farmer. A graduate of MIT, he has served as Clinical Director and Chief Medical Officer at the University Of Bridgeport College Of Naturopathic Medicine. This book is a must for anyone who is interested in whole natural foods. Milk, raw milk that is, has been referred to as nature’s most perfect food because of it numerous health benefits.

The debate of raw versus pasteurized milk is overwhelmingly over safety. We’ve been told over and over again for decades in order for milk to be safe to consume, it needs to be pasteurized. Could it be that people extolling its benefits for thousands of years had no idea how dangerous it was? According to Ron Schmid, we should have the same right to whole raw dairy products in order to reap the benefits our ancestors had.

How much disease attributed to raw milk was actually caused by raw milk? In the early 1900’s when both types, raw and pasteurized coexisted, there was significant controversy within the public health establishment. Official numbers concluded that raw milk was responsible for 10 – 40 percent of all typhoid fever. One paper concluded .221 of one percent of typhoid fever, scarlet fever and diphtheria in the entire U.S. was attributable to milk. Looks to me like more unbiased research should have been done.

One thing we do know is that chronic diseases attributed to cattle have been effectively eradicated, which obviously makes the milk produced by these cattle more safe. Another is that many other contaminants such as Salmonella and Campylobacter originate in feces. These organisms cause over 2 million cases per year in the U.S. In an 8 year period, only 700 cases were attributed to raw milk consumption. The total number of food-borne illness from all causes is now 73 million per year. Schimid points out the obvious, that milk is not uniquely hazardous and should not be treated as such. He makes a strong case for treating raw milk production and like another food. Why can we eat raw fish but not raw milk?

So how much of a problem was raw milk? No matter what the answer was, raw milk became a problem. A large push by commercial interests to influence politicians and market the virtues of pasteurized milk occurred in the early 1900’s. Unfortunately, the public’s perception of raw milk went sour and so did sales. Never mind the fact that the dairy industry was more interested in mass production and shelf life than health.

It has become very clear as with many other products in our food supply money, not health is the deciding factor. If you are at all interested in learning about the benefits of raw milk, its history and how you can get involved in making raw milk available to all, read this book, and visit www.westonaprice.com.

Written by Robert Kennedy and Tosca Reno

Upon opening this book I was impressed; the foreword was written by Jack La Lanne a pioneer of health and fitness. I watched The Jack La Lanne Show as a kid; it was the first fitness show on TV; I’ve been involved in health and fitness since. This is a man who on his 70th birthday swam a mile while shackled to 70 boats carrying 70 people. He attributes his outstanding health, now at 95 years young, to clean living.

Jack La Lanne was the first well known advocate for deriving health and strength from “eating clean”, which is the premise of The Eat Clean Diet for Men. This book is an easy to follow prescription to change your health for the better with no carb or calorie counting. It’s loaded with helpful tools like: creating a game plan for grocery shopping to ensure healthy choices, eating on the road, and eating right while dining out.

Some of The Eat-Clean principles
• Eat 5 or 6 small meals a day.
• Combine lean protein with complex carbohydrates at every meal.
• Never miss a meal, especially breakfast.
• Avoid all over-processed, refined foods especially flour and sugar.
• Avoid sugar-loaded colas and juices.
• Consume adequate good fats (EFA’s) each day.
• Stick to proper portion sizes – give up the super sizing!

There are only two points made in the book that I firmly disagree with. The first is the recommendation to avoid all saturated fats. The fact is, these fats are very healthy and a necessary part of the human diet; saturated fats have nothing to do with obesity or cardiovascular disease as the media and medical community has lead us to believe. Second and probably most important, soy milk is on one of the grocery lists and included in a few recipes. Soy’s deleterious effects are indisputable and I’ve written about them several times. Among other problems with soy, twenty five grams of soy product per day is enough to disrupt your thyroid function, which is at odds with becoming leaner and healthier. Just use skim milk.

Outside of the above two concerns, I enjoyed reading The Eat Clean Diet for Men. Robert Kennedy and Tosca Reno make eating clean as fail proof as possible. I recommend this book not only to the average person just trying to lose that extra weight and improve their health, but to the experience fitness buff as well. I’m certain that anyone who reads The Eat Clean Diet for Men will take away something from this book to improve their lives.

For decades we have been taught that fat is bad for us, carbohydrates are good, and that the key to a healthy weight is eating less and exercising more. Yet with more and more people acting on this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. With seven years of research, Taubes argues persuasively that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates (white flour, sugar, easily digested starches) ”via their dramatic effect on insulin, the hormone that regulates fat accumulation”and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the numbers. There are good calories, and bad ones. Taubes traces how the common assumption that carbohydrates are fattening was abandoned in the 1960’s when fat and cholesterol were blamed for heart disease and then”wrongly”were seen as the causes of a host of other maladies, including cancer. He shows us how these unproven hypotheses were emphatically embraced by authorities in nutrition, public health, and clinical medicine, in spite of how well-conceived clinical trials have consistently refuted them. He also documents the dietary trials of carbohydrate-restriction, which consistently show that the fewer carbohydrates we consume, the leaner we will be.

Good Calories Bad Calories is the end of the debate about the foods we consume and their effects on us.

The South Beach Diet is nothing new.  It is another low carb diet wrapped up in a new package.  Some have called it a friendlier version of the very popular Atkins diet.  Dr. Agatston from the get go claims his South Beach Diet is not low carb, however, the usual carbohydrate foods like bread, fruit, fruit juice, rice, potatoes, pasta, sugar and snacks are excluded.  No matter how it is marketed, it is most certainly low carb.

Low carb diets have been all the rage for quite a while now.  Bodybuilders and fitness athletes have been using this strategy to keep lean and build muscle for decades.  The main reason low carb diets are still so popular, is simple; they work!

For those not familiar with how low carb diets work, it has to do with how our bodies ability to process them.  When food is ingested our bodies secrete insulin.  Insulin is a storage hormone.  To be more specific, its a fat storage hormone.  The higher your insulin levels are the higher the percentage of food will be stored as fat.  Moreover, the higher your insulin is the lower the amount of fat burned as fuel.  Hence, the biggest key to burning fat is to keep your insulin levels low, which is accomplished by consuming a diet of whole unprocessed food that is low in carbohydrates.  The South Beach diet helps one accomplish this, but this is where the benefits of this book end.

Like many doctors and other so-called experts they are taught what to think not how to think.  Dr. Agatson advocates a higher protein diet that is LOW in fat.  One is supposed to consume skim milk, lean meat, and urges the reader never to use animal fats.

Dr Agatson completely disregards the benefits of animal fats for the dangerous side effects of polyunsaturated fats.  For instance, he prohibits the use of butter and urges readers to use processed spreads.

The good Dr. claims you be hungry on the South Beach diet.  Anyone who follows this diet will find the opposite is true.  With a diet that is so low in fat, especially saturated fat, and carbohydrates there is nothing to satisfy your hunger.

Cutting out junk foods like sugar, and processed food in general is always a step in the right direction.  However, his advocating polyunsaturated fats over saturated fats make the South Beach diet one of the most dangerous diets out there.
 

So, I’m a few chapters into this book by Richard J. Machowicz called “Unleash the Warrior Within” and I stumble on something he refers to as “Verbal Command Request”.

Machowicz is a former SEAL member and the creator of Bukido, which is a training system designed to get over fears or obstacles that stand in the way of accomplishing what your really want in life. I’m always looking for books or articles that help me stay focused in life, and this one seems decent.  

Anyway, Machowicz refers to VCR as ‘a command you use on yourself or another that is structured in a specific way to elicit a known result’. Basically, a short phrase that you use to help you focus, relax or possibly build adrenaline.

I thought it was a little corny, but I’m at the gym yesterday busting out some dead lifts and my mind starts to quit. I’m fatiguing and I’m thinking of just moving on to something else. Just then, a phrase (maybe from a movie?) pops into my head: “Can’t quit, won’t quit”. Suddenly, my focus came back, I was rejuvenated and I finished out the rest of the set. I kept repeating the phrase throughout my workout and ended up having a great day at the gym. It’s like the phrase wouldn’t allow me to shut it down without finishing what I came to do. 

I thought I would share this, because we all battle mental demons on a daily basis. Our bodies are capable of so much if our minds are right. And you never know what will get you through a tough workout, a hard day at work or any other obstacle. So try the VCR method, you might be surprised. I know I was.