5 Reasons Your Digestive System Doesn’t Function Properly and What to Do About That

Digestive system plays a major role in the overall health of your body. Digestive problems are particularly common in Western society and have become part of the daily routine of many of us, but in normal condition they are not supposed to appear at all. Too many people have become accustomed to living with digestive disorders such as abdominal pain and bloating, irritable bowel and constipation.

Here I would like to show you 5 factors that can affect your digestive system and cause it to function improperly. I will also suggest you solutions to overcome these factors:

1. Stress

You don’t need a doctor to know that stress plays a major role in the health of our gut. The biochemical changes that occur when we are stressed have significant and immediate impact on our gut function. When the brain feels very stressed, it releases  various hormones that cause changes to the digestive system in the short term, such as lack of appetite, heartburn, nausea, diarrhea and stomach pain. In the long term, prolonged stress can worsen chronic diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and heartburn.

It not only affects existing chronic diseases, but may also lead to the development of a variety of gastrointestinal diseases such as gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), peptic ulcer disease, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and even food allergies. Stress can cause inflammation of the gastrointestinal system, and makes you more susceptible to infection. A healthy lifestyle should include stress reduction techniques that will improve not only your digestive system, but your overall well-being. To help you better cope with stress, read my article about 14 Effective Natural Remedies for Stress and Anxiety and 7 Simple and Effective Meditation Techniques to Reduce Stress.

2. Enzyme Deficiency

There are many factors that can affect your body’s ability to produce a high enough enzyme level to maintain good health. These can be: unhealthy diet, air pollution, emotional stress, lack of sleep and more. Enzyme deficiency is the root of many digestion problems in our society. Your digestive enzymes, which are mostly produced in your pancreas, help you break down the food into nutrients so that your body can absorb them. Enzyme deficiency results in poor digestion and poor nutrient absorption,  and this creates a variety of gastrointestinal problems, including: constipation, bloating, cramping and heartburn.

We get many enzymes from the foods we eat, especially raw foods that directly help with our digestive process. To maintain a healthy enzyme levels it’s important to eat raw foods that are enzyme-rich. Consuming them helps your body’s to produce its own enzymes and reduces the burden on your body to produce the enzymes it needs. In addition to raw foods, read my article how to make digestive enzyme detox smoothie which contains digestive enzymes that help to ease the burden of the complicated process of digestion.

3. Magnesium Deficiency

Magnesium deficiency causes, among many other things, constipation and digestive-related disorders. Your body uses this important mineral to aid in the digestion process. Without magnesium, your body cannot properly digest foods, as it activates enzymes that let the body digest and break down food into smaller pieces for energy, and it also works to produce and transport energy during digestion.You may not get enough magnesium in your diet. Having the right amount of magnesium in your body is important to your digestive and overall health, so make sure to include magnesium-rich foods, such as dark green leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, beans, lentils, avocados, bananas and dried fruits. Magnesium is also available as a supplement, but you should not take magnesium supplement without a physician’s approval as it can interfere with current medications that you take.

4. Intestinal Flora Imbalance

Our intestinal tract is full of various species of bacteria and yeasts that help digestion, kill harmful and pathogenic infections as well as helping to produce many vitamins and other chemical substances needed for our health.  These organisms that live in our intestines are called the intestinal flora. When the good or friendly flora are missing or in low concentration, it allows
other harmful pathogens to multiply in the intestine. This affects the digestion of food, and can cause many other symptoms, since the pathogens create toxins that are absorbed into the body.

The causes for intestinal flora imbalance can be due to illnesses, improper diet, antibiotic use,  other medications, food chemicals and more. In these cases you may want to consider taking probiotics. You can refer in this matter to my article 9 reasons to take probiotics and why it’s so good for you. Or you can eat live-culture yogurt that often provides plenty of probiotics and is the simplest way to get them.  Make sure that the label states that it is live culture yogurt, as some companies pasteurize or kill the probiotic organisms after they have fermented the milk to make yogurt.

5. Heavy Metal Toxicity

The presence of toxic metals, such as too much mercury, aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, lead and nickel, has a damaging effect on the intestinal flora for some people. These metals flood the environment and can be found in cookware, household cleaners, cosmetics, air pollution, insecticides, herbicides and smoking that causes cadmium poisoning. They invade our body and cause or contribute to a long list of diseases.

To help fight heavy metal toxicity you can use clay to detox your body, or consume foods rich in pectin fibers (such as apples). Those fibers bind cholesterol and heavy metals to cleanse blood and intestines. Cilantro or coriander also aids our body to get rid of mercury and other heavy metals that end up in our bloodstream. Also chlorophyll rich-foods are food in this case. Chlorophyll is the green color in green leaves ,fruits and veges. It is not just a pigment, it connects with the toxins and free radicals and turns them into neutral materials. Studies have shown that chlorophyll helps in cleaning heavy metals that tend to accumulate in our body in different places, and has anti cancer properties, that specifically affect the liver. Read more about it in my article how to detoxify your body using chlorophyll. Also the green algae chlorella has been shown to help remove heavy metals, such as cadmium and mercury, pesticides and industrial pollutants from the body, thus helping to detoxify it. You can find more information in my article how to boost your health by eating seaweeds and algae. You can also prepare herbal infusion from red clover blossoms that also cleanse heavy metals and chemical toxicity, include those caused by the use of drugs.

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4 Solutions for Preserving Brain Health and Preventing Alzheimers

Young people may not be so worried about where their minds will be 40 or 50 years from now, but it’s extremely important to preserve brain health through diet and exercise to really enjoy life at all stages. According to current 2013 statistics, more than 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, with 1 in 3 seniors dying with Alzheimer’s or dementia. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Simple dietary changes along with some physical activity may be more than enough to prevent and even reverse these cognitive issues in many cases.

Here are 4 solutions for Alzheimer’s disease.


1. Coconut Oil

The connection between coconut oil and Alzheimer’s may be one of the most well known dietary connections publicized today, as coconut oil is among the most promising solutions for those suffering from Alzheimer’s. One story in particular reveals just how powerful coconut oil can be for repairing and restoring the brain. In the story, a man named Steve Newport tried numerous pharmaceutical solutions, all of which failed miserably.

Not able to remember how to draw the face of a clock or get water out of the refrigerator, Mr. Newport was becoming more and more lost. Finally, his wife found out about some promising information. What’s known as ketones provide an alternative energy source for brain cells when they have trouble using glucose — as they do in patients with dementia. And when the body metabolizes medium-chain triglycerides derived from coconut oil, it forms ketones that may protect against and even reverse Alzheimer’s.

After taking coconut oil twice daily for a year, Mr. Newport’s dementia had reversed itself.

2. Marijuana

While this treatment may seem far-fetched, marijuana has actually been found to outperform drugs for Alzheimer’s disease. One study from Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology that was published in the journal Molecular Pharmacology, found that the psychoactive component of marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), both “competitively inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE) as well as prevents AChE-induced amyloid β-peptide (Aβ) aggregation”. In plain English, cannabinoid molecules found in cannabis could halt the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and prevent plaque buildup in the brain.


“Compared to currently approved drugs prescribed for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, THC is a considerably superior inhibitor of Aβ aggregation, and this study provides a previously unrecognized molecular mechanism through which cannabinoid molecules may directly impact the progression of this debilitating disease,” says study author Lisa M. Eubanks”.

3. Coffee
A paper published earlier this year in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease demonstrated that higher plasma caffeine levels were associated with a reduced or delayed onset of dementia in 124 individuals, aged 65-88 years. This is presumed to be indicative of coffee intake. The study abstract concludes with:

4. Cinnamon

In one study from Tel Aviv University, cinnamon bark was shown to inhibit the compounds found in the plaque formations of Alzheimer’s patient’s’ brains. These filaments are actually “disassembled and eliminated” when cinnamon is taken with food or as a supplement.

For the study, scientists extracted a compound in cinnamon called CEppt and mixed it into the drinking water for mice and flies. Both the mice and flies were genetically forced to experience Alzheimer’s symptoms. After four months, the scientists found that the disease slowed in progression and the animals experienced almost normal longevity and activity.



And this isn’t the first study to look at cinnamon’s effects on the brain. Two studies from Wheeling Jesuit University found that the scent and flavor of cinnamon affected attention, memory, and other intellectual qualities nearly instantly.

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Can Chinese Herbal Medicine Treat Cancer? The Research Says Yes

A large scale review of research by Australia and Chinese University scientists has proved with thousands of studies using hundreds of thousands of cancer patients that Chinese herbal medicine offers significant treatment for most types of cancers - including breast cancer.

The research comes from Australia's University of Western Sydney and the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. The researchers analyzed and reviewed 2,964 human clinical studies that involved 253,434 cancer patients. Among these were 2,385 randomized controlled studies and 579 non-randomized controlled studies.

These studies covered most of the cancer types, but the cancers most studied were lung cancer, liver cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, esophageal cancer, colorectal cancer and nasopharyngeal (throat and sinus) cancer. Yes, breast cancer was the fourth most-studied type of cancer among these thousands of clinical studies.

The researchers discovered that the overwhelming majority of studies – 90% of the clinical studies - utilized herbal medicine.

The researchers found that 72% of these studies applied Traditional Chinese Medicine alongside conventional treatment, but a full 28% applied Traditional Chinese Medicine separately to experimental groups.

In terms of cancer patients, about 64% were given both TCM and conventional medical treatments. The rest were given TCM therapy alone, but a little over half of them did not qualify whether the patient was given conventional treatment at some point in the past.

Because of the large number of studies, there were different types of results, depending upon the type of study, the type of treatment, and the outcome measures tested. Still, in a full 1,015 studies or 85% of those that reported on symptoms, TCM treatment resulted in improvement of cancer symptoms with many of those reporting reduced pain. Another 883 studies – 70% – showed increased survival rates. Another 38% showed reduced tumor size, and 28% showed increased quality of life. Another 19% showed lower relapse rates and another 7% showed reduced complications.

The researchers also found that only a few studies tested TCM acupuncture treatment in cancer therapy. In their discussion they qualified that acupuncture treatment in cancer therapy to alleviate pain is quite popular in the U.S., but in Chinese cancer studies, herbal medicine therapy is the leading type of holistic treatment for cancer.

This study follows another extensive review of research published in 2012 on TCM cancer treatment. This study comes from Norway's National Research Center in Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the University of Tromsø, Norway, also with collaboration with the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine.

This earlier study reviewed significantly fewer studies, compiling 716 trials that included 1,198 cancer patients with either leukemia, stomach cancer, liver cancer or esophageal cancer.

Among these studies, 98.5% used herbal medicine, and again, acupuncture therapy was rare. In this study, symptom improvement was achieved in 85% of the patients that used the TCM therapy.

In yet another study - this one much larger than the second - 1,217 clinical studies between 1958 and 2011, involving 92,945 patients were analyzed and reviewed by researchers from the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. Among these studies, 66% of the patients were treated with TCM therapy alone, while 34% of the patients were treated with a combination of TCM and conventional cancer therapy. Also, 82% of the patients were given herbal medicines orally.

Only 5% of the patients were given more than one type of TCM therapy. This means that 95% were treated with only one type of TCM therapy - typically with a precise combination of herbs.

This study found that among the studies treating cancer, symptom relief was the prominent result among 88% of the studies and among 88% of the patients tested with TCM therapy. Increased survival rates resulted in 73% of patients. Among all the rest of the studies, 96% of the trials resulted in symptom relief and 92% of the patients reported cancer symptom relief.

Did we get this right? Was that 88% and 92% symptom improvement or relief among thousands of studies and nearly 100,000 cancer patients? And 85% improvement of cancer symptoms among 716 clinical studies? And 85% symptom improvement among 1,015 clinical studies among a review involving over 250,000 cancer patients that tested the effectiveness of Chinese herbal medicine against cancer?

It sounds pretty solid that Chinese herbal medicine does indeed treat cancer and overwhelmingly results in the improvement or relief of symptoms as well as longer survival rates and reduced metastases.

Now why again is Western conventional medicine still refusing to at least consider herbal medicine therapy in cancer treatment? Could there be a profit motive involved? Could it have to do with the fact that herbal medicines cannot be patented? In other words, is Western conventional medicine ignoring inexpensive natural treatments that could help millions of cancer patients simply because of profits?

Actions speak louder than words.

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Top 10 Cannabis Studies the Government Wished it Had Never Funded

10) MARIJUANA USE HAS NO EFFECT ON MORTALITY: A massive study of California HMO members funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) found marijuana use caused no significant increase in mortality. Tobacco use was associated with increased risk of death.
Sidney, S et al. Marijuana Use and Mortality. American Journal of Public Health. Vol. 87 No. 4, April 1997. p. 585-590. Sept. 2002.


9) HEAVY MARIJUANA USE AS A YOUNG ADULT WON’T RUIN YOUR LIFE: Veterans Affairs scientists looked at whether heavy marijuana use as a young adult caused long-term problems later, studying identical twins in which one twin had been a heavy marijuana user for a year or longer but had stopped at least one month before the study, while the second twin had used marijuana no more than five times ever. Marijuana use had no significant impact on physical or mental health care utilization, health-related quality of life, or current socio-demographic characteristics.
Eisen SE et al. Does Marijuana Use Have Residual Adverse Effects on Self-Reported Health Measures, Socio-Demographics or Quality of Life? A Monozygotic Co-Twin Control Study in Men. Addiction. Vol. 97 No. 9. p.1083-1086. Sept. 1997


8) THE “GATEWAY EFFECT” MAY BE A MIRAGE: Marijuana is often called a “gateway drug” by supporters of prohibition, who point to statistical “associations” indicating that persons who use marijuana are more likely to eventually try hard drugs than those who never use marijuana – implying that marijuana use somehow causes hard drug use. But a model developed by RAND Corp. researcher Andrew Morral demonstrates that these associations can be explained “without requiring a gateway effect.” More likely, this federally funded study suggests, some people simply have an underlying propensity to try drugs, and start with what’s most readily available.
 Morral AR, McCaffrey D and Paddock S. Reassessing the Marijuana Gateway Effect. Addiction. December 2002. p. 1493-1504.


 

7) PROHIBITION DOESN’T WORK (PART I): The White House had the National Research Council examine the data being gathered about drug use and the effects of U.S. drug policies. NRC concluded, “the nation possesses little information about the effectiveness of current drug policy, especially of drug law enforcement.” And what data exist show “little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and prevalence or frequency of use.” In other words, there is no proof that prohibition – the cornerstone of U.S. drug policy for a century – reduces drug use.
National Research Council. Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us. National Academy Press, 2001. p. 193.


6) PROHIBITION DOESN’T WORK (PART II): DOES PROHIBITION CAUSE THE “GATEWAY EFFECT”?): U.S. and Dutch researchers, supported in part by NIDA, compared marijuana users in San Francisco, where non-medical use remains illegal, to Amsterdam, where adults may possess and purchase small amounts of marijuana from regulated businesses. Looking at such parameters as frequency and quantity of use and age at onset of use, they found no differences except one: Lifetime use of hard drugs was significantly lower in Amsterdam, with its “tolerant” marijuana policies. For example, lifetime crack cocaine use was 4.5 times higher in San Francisco than Amsterdam. Reinarman, C, Cohen, PDA, and Kaal, HL. The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy: Cannabis in Amsterdam and San Francisco.
American Journal of Public Health. Vol. 94, No. 5. May 2004. p. 836-842.

5) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART I): Federal researchers implanted several types of cancer, including leukemia and lung cancers, in mice, then treated them with cannabinoids (unique, active components found in marijuana). THC and other cannabinoids shrank tumors and increased the mice’s lifespans. Munson, AE et al. Antineoplastic Activity of Cannabinoids.
 Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Sept. 1975. p. 597-602.


4) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER, (PART II): In a 1994 study the government tried to suppress, federal researchers gave mice and rats massive doses of THC, looking for cancers or other signs of toxicity. The rodents given THC lived longer and had fewer cancers, “in a dose-dependent manner” (i.e. the more THC they got, the fewer tumors). NTP Technical Report On The Toxicology And Carcinogenesis Studies Of 1-Trans- Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol, CAS No. 1972-08-3, In F344/N Rats And B6C3F Mice, Gavage Studies.
  See also, “Medical Marijuana: Unpublished Federal Study Found THC-Treated Rats Lived Longer, Had Less Cancer,” AIDS Treatment News no. 263, Jan. 17, 1997

3) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART III): Researchers at the Kaiser-Permanente HMO, funded by NIDA, followed 65,000 patients for nearly a decade, comparing cancer rates among non-smokers, tobacco smokers, and marijuana smokers. Tobacco smokers had massively higher rates of lung cancer and other cancers. Marijuana smokers who didn’t also use tobacco had no increase in risk of tobacco-related cancers or of cancer risk overall. In fact their rates of lung and most other cancers were slightly lower than non-smokers, though the difference did not reach statistical significance.
Sidney, S. et al. Marijuana Use and Cancer Incidence (California, United States). Cancer Causes and Control. Vol. 8. Sept. 1997, p. 722-728.


2) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART IV): Donald Tashkin, a UCLA researcher whose work is funded by NIDA, did a case-control study comparing 1,200 patients with lung, head and neck cancers to a matched group with no cancer. Even the heaviest marijuana smokers had no increased risk of cancer, and had somewhat lower cancer risk than non-smokers (tobacco smokers had a 20-fold increased lung cancer risk).
Tashkin D. Marijuana Use and Lung Cancer: Results of a Case-Control Study. American Thoracic Society International Conference. May 23, 2006.


1) MARIJUANA DOES HAVE MEDICAL VALUE: In response to passage of California’s medical marijuana law, the White House had the Institute of Medicine (IOM) review the data on marijuana’s medical benefits and risks. The IOM concluded, “Nausea, appetite loss, pain and anxiety are all afflictions of wasting, and all can be mitigated by marijuana.” While noting potential risks of smoking, the report acknowledged there is no clear alternative for people suffering from chronic conditions that might be relieved by smoking marijuana, such as pain or AIDS wasting. The government’s refusal to acknowledge this finding caused co-author John A. Benson to tell the New York Times that the government loves to ignore our report; they would rather it never happened.
(Joy, JE, Watson, SJ, and Benson, JA. Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base. National Academy Press. 1999. p. 159. See also, Harris, G. FDA Dismisses Medical Benefit From Marijuana. New York Times. Apr. 21, 2006)

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