Day: February 19, 2014

I love Stevia! It is one of many healthy, yet zero calorie, sweeteners. Don’t use harmful artificial sweeteners! Use natural alternatives to pure sugar!

Four Natural Sweeteners That Are Actually Healthy

Care2 – Authority Nutrition Column “There are quite a few sweeteners that are perfectly safe to eat. They are low in calories, low in fructose and taste very sweet. Here are 4 natural sweeteners that are actually healthy.

1. Stevia

Stevia is a very popular low-calorie (Dr. Bill: “Actually ZERO calorie!”) sweetener. It is extracted from the leaves of a plant called Stevia rebaudiana. This plant has been grown for sweetness and medicinal purposes for centuries in South America.
There are several sweet compounds found in Stevia leaves, the main ones are Stevioside and Rebaudioside A. Both are many hundred times sweeter than sugar, gram for gram. Stevia is very sweet, but has virtually no calories. There are some studies in humans showing Stevia to have health benefits:

• When blood pressure is high, Stevia can lower it by 6-14%. However, it has no effect on blood pressure that is normal or only mildly elevated.
• Stevia has been shown to lower blood sugar levels in diabetics.
• There are also studies in rats showing that Stevia can improve insulin sensitivity, reduce oxidized LDL cholesterol and reduce plaque build up in the arteries.

If you need to sweeten something, Stevia may be the healthiest choice. However… many people really hate the taste of Stevia. It does depend on the brand though, you may need to experiment to find one that you like. (Dr. Bill: “I recommend Now ‘Better Stevia’ Brand”)

2. Erythritol

Erythritol is another low-calorie sweetener. It is a sugar alcohol that is found naturally in certain fruits, but if you’re buying powdered erythritol then it will most likely be made via an industrial process. It contains 0.24 calories per gram, or about 6% of the calories as sugar, with 70% of the sweetness.

Erythritol doesn’t spike blood sugar or insulin levels and has no effect on biomarkers like cholesterol or triglycerides (7, 8). It is absorbed into the body from the intestine, but eventually excreted from the kidneys unchanged (9). Studies show that erythritol is very safe. However, same as with other sugar alcohols, it can cause digestive issues if you consume too much at a time (10, 11).

Erythritol tastes very much like sugar, although it can have a mild aftertaste. I wouldn’t say that erythritol is “healthy” – but it certainly doesn’t appear to be harmful in any way and seems to be better tolerated than most other sugar alcohols.

3. Xylitol

Xylitol is a sugar alcohol with a sweetness similar to sugar. It contains 2.4 calories per gram, or about 2/3rds of the caloric value of sugar.

Xylitol appears to have some benefits for dental health, reducing the risk of cavities and dental decay (12, 13). It may also improve bone density, helping to prevent osteoporosis (14). Xylitol doesn’t raise blood sugar or insulin levels (15).

However, as with other sugar alcohols, it can cause digestive side effects at high doses. If you have a dog in your home, then you might want to keep xylitol out of the house because it is highly toxic to dogs (16).

4. Yacon Syrup

Recently I reviewed a rather unique sweetener called Yacon syrup. It is harvested from the Yacon plant, which grows natively in the Andes in South America. This sweetener has recently become popular as a weight loss supplement, because one study found that it caused significant weight loss in overweight women (17).

It is very high in fructooligosaccharides, which function as soluble fibers that feed the good bacteria in the intestine (18, 19). Yacon syrup can help against constipation and it has various benefits due to the high amount of soluble fiber (20). Don’t eat too much at a time though, as it can cause digestive problems.

What About ‘Less Bad’ Sugars Like Honey?

There are several popular sweeteners that health conscious people often eat instead of sugar. This includes coconut sugar, molasses, honey and maple syrup.

I recently wrote an article making the case that they really aren’t much different from sugar. They may contain slightly smaller amounts of fructose and some tiny amount of nutrients, but your liver really won’t be able to tell the difference.

However… I should definitely clarify something here. The harmful effects of sugar depend completely on the context. Most of the studies are done on people who are already eating a high-carb, Western junk food diet. For those people, especially those who are overweight and/or insulin resistant, large amounts of sugar are downright toxic. There are a few people who might want to avoid sugar-based sweeteners completely. This includes food addicts, binge eaters and people who are on a very low-carb, ketogenic diet.

Other people can eat sugar in small amounts without any harm. It is still empty calories and will still be bad for your teeth, but it won’t harm your metabolism, give you fatty liver or end up destroying your health. If you’re one of those people who eat healthy but like to to bake stuff with healthy ingredients, then I don’t see a problem with using natural sweeteners like honey as long as the majority of your diet is based on real food.

In the context of a healthy, real food based diet, small amounts of these natural sugar-based sweeteners won’t cause harm.”

Big Pharma can’t patent vitamins, so this treatment is likely to be suppressed as a possible solution to cancer treatment!

High-dose vitamin C injections shown to annihilate cancer

(NaturalNews) “Groundbreaking new research on the cancer-fighting potential of vitamin C has made the pages of the peer-reviewed journal Science Translational Medicine. A team of researchers from the University of Kansas reportedly tested the effects of vitamin C given in high doses intravenously on a group of human subjects and found that it effectively eradicates cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact.

Building upon earlier research pioneered in the 1970s by the late Linus Pauling, a chemist from Oregon State University who today is recognized as the world’s foremost proponent of therapeutic vitamin C, the new research involved injecting high doses of vitamin C into human ovarian cells. The tests were conducted in vitro in a lab, as well as directly in both mice and a group of 22 human subjects.

According to BBC News, the tests showed favorable results in all three models, as the vitamin C effectively targeted the ovarian cancer cells while avoiding healthy cells. The benefits of high-dose vitamin C were also observed in conjunction with conventional chemotherapy treatments, which destroy all cells, both healthy and malignant, eventually leading to patient death.

‘Patients are looking for safe and low-cost choices in their management of cancer,’ stated Dr. Jeanne Drisko, a co-author of the study, to BBC News concerning the findings. ‘Intravenous vitamin C has that potential based on our basic science research and early clinical data.’

Researchers admit more human trials on intravenous vitamin C unlikely because drug companies cannot patent vitamins

The next step for this type of research would typically involve applying these same parameters in a large-scale clinical human trial to see if they can be replicated and confirmed. While this new study is admittedly convincing on its own, the hurdles to gaining widespread acceptance of its findings include replicating them across a much larger human sample size.

But this may never actually take place. And the reason, says the research team, is that such trials require major funding that typically comes from pharmaceutical companies interested in developing a patented drug. Drug companies, in other words, are hardly interesting in promoting the medicinal benefits of natural substances like vitamin C, which stands to decimate the multibillion-dollar conventional cancer industry if word gets out about its benefits.

‘Because vitamin C has no patent potential, its development will not be supported by pharmaceutical companies,’ says Qi Chen, lead author of the new study. ‘We believe that the time has arrived for research agencies to vigorously support thoughtful and meticulous clinical trials with intravenous vitamin C.’

The conventional medical industry’s response to these and similar findings over the years has been nothing short of derisive, which is to be expected. Having to rationalize decades of ushering cancer patients through the gauntlet of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery — with dismal results — while ignoring natural cancer-fighting alternatives like vitamin C is a hard pill to swallow for this powerful, high-profit industry, which would rather everyone ignore such findings than think critically about them.

‘[A]scorbate is processed by the body in different ways when administered orally versus intravenously,’ writes Heidi Ledford for Nature about this commonly misunderstood variance. The medical-industrial complex, it turns out, intentionally corrupts the conversation on vitamin C by convoluting the distinct effects of these very different delivery routes.

‘Oral doses [of vitamin C] act as antioxidants, protecting cells from damage caused by reactive compounds that contain oxygen. But vitamin C given intravenously can have the opposite effect by promoting the formation of one of those compounds: hydrogen peroxide. Cancer cells are particularly susceptible to damage by such reactive oxygen-containing compounds.'”