No Stress Bone Broth Powder

Bone broth is a wonderful, medicinal drink to help heal the gut, immune system, skin, hair, and brain.  I have written on it's health benefits before and in my office have handouts with recipes.  Even though simmering a bone for hours sounds easy sometimes it's hard for my patients to comply.  It's only worth making if the bone is organic and sometimes that can be hard to find.  The broth is also a warm drink that can be hard to drink in the heat of the summer.  So I went looking for alternatives to making your own and found some online companies where you can buy it but it's on the expensive side.  Bare and Bones has a great one but with shipping it is $90 for 6 pounds of it.  In my research, a patient actually brought  to my attention, Epigenetic Labs that makes a bone broth powder.  How convenient!  I already do a morning shake for most of my breakfasts and instead of protein powder I would try the bone broth powder that is 20 grams of protein for a scoop.  I bought the original for $49 for about 25 scoops (chocolate and vanilla are sweetened with stevia which are great options for the original does have to be hidden in a smoothie).  



Besides a great source of protein the bone broth helps heal the gut, grow healthier nails, skin and hair and is great brain food!  A wonderful way to start the day!  So you can add just water or milk to the powder or make a smoothie.  Here's the recipe I use for my morning smoothie with my Ninja blender:

1/2 an avocado with the pit
1 cup spinach
1 scoop bone broth powder
1 Tbsp. flax seeds
8 cocoa beans
1 Tbsp. maple syrup
1Tbsp. bee pollen
1/2 inch turmeric root
1/2 inch ginger root
1/2 inch sunchoke
1 Tbsp. spirulina

'Healthy' Ice Cream!

With my diet being sugar-free, dairy-free and gluten-free one of the hardest foods to find for me to eat is ice cream.  It's not easy to be constantly telling my daughter no as we pass by ice cream trucks.  Luckily she understands when we go to birthday parties and we bring our own dessert.  At certain stores you can find ice cream made from coconut milk or almond milk and sweetened with agave or cane sugar.  Cane sugar or evaporated cane juice is different than 'sugar' and it will be labelled as 'cane sugar'.   It is the same sugar that comes from the cane stalk but is less processed and therefore the body recognizes it as food and not as a toxin and doesn't do harm to the body.  But still too much does spike the blood sugar and cause a flood of insulin which puts stress on the pancreas and digestive system.  So even too much of a healthy thing is still too much.  I test for both sugar and cane sugar as food sensitivities so it can be decided if your body can handle the cane sugar or not.  Luckily for my daughter and I, we can.  

So that brings us to 620 Manhattan Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11222, across the street from my Brooklyn office, to an artisanal ice cream shoppe, Van Leeuwen, where they make  delicious ice cream using organic cane sugar.  They have flavors that use dairy and they have others that use coconut cream and cashew milk.  The vegan flavors include: 

DARK CHOCOLATE

SALTED CARAMEL 

CHOC CHIP COOKIE DOUGH 

MINT CHIP

COFFEE BEAN

BANANA NUT

PEANUT BUTTER CHOC CHIP

MATCHA GREEN TEA

My daughter had a scoop of the chocolate and I had a scoop of the coffee and it was delish!

They have 3 trucks in NYC that if you go to their website you can find the locations of for they change daily.  They also have trucks in LA.  They have 8 shops with 5 in NYC and 3 in LA.  They have 3 in Brooklyn (Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Boerum Hill) and 2 in Manhattan (West Village, East Village).  So check it out and enjoy!  Happy summer!

Is Butter Healthy For You?

I am an avid supporter of eating butter. I truly believe it is a healthy fat that should be in your diet. For those of you not eating or drinking milk or cheese you can still eat butter for butter does not contain mold, casein or lactose in it which are the main reasons why people cannot digest milk or cheese well. I put butter in the same category as olive oil and coconut oil for healthy cooking and science is slowly catching up now declaring butter 'may not be bad' for you which is a far different story than what science was saying decades ago when it was declaring butter will clog arteries and cause heart attacks.

A systematic review and meta-analysis looking at the association of butter consumption with chronic disease and all-cause mortality made headlines. Senior author Dariush Mozaffarian noted that “overall, our results suggest that butter should neither be demonized nor considered ‘back’ as a route to good health.”

What the study missed unfortunately is there is no specific comparison (i.e. butter vs. olive oil), so the default comparison becomes butter vs. the rest of the diet. That means butter is being compared to a largely unhealthy mix of refined grains, soda, other sources of sugar, potatoes, and red meat (for reference, less than five percent of the US population meet the Dietary Guidelines for Americans). Partially hydrogenated oils—a source of trans fat—were also in the mix, as they would have been high in the food supply during much of the time period of the studies included.

Overall, the study reported that butter consumption was weakly associated with increased total mortality, not associated with cardiovascular disease, and slightly protective against diabetes. These predominantly neutral findings for butter were also acknowledged in the press release:

“Even though people who eat more butter generally have worse diets and lifestyles, it seemed to be pretty neutral overall,” said lead author Laura Pimpin. “This suggests that butter may be a “middle-of-the-road” food: a more healthful choice than sugar or starch, such as the white bread or potato on which butter is commonly spread and which have been linked to higher risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease".

So with this step of declaring butter as neutral maybe in another decade science will actually agree with me. We shall see!

Green Vaccine

The concept of the vaccine is accurate.  Introducing a germ into the body in a low dose so the immune system can build antibodies to it and not get sick in the future is how the body was made to deal with germs.  The problem with vaccines is not the germ but the mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde and any other toxins they put in it.  There is a way to get a vaccine using homeopathy and not injections.  The method is called homeoprophylaxis, or HP for short. HP is delivered on tiny sugar pellets, one disease at a time, devoid of adjuvents, preservatives, antibiotics, animal viruses, GMOs or excipients of any kind. It contains only the frequency of the disease. This is how illness occurs in nature. The innate developing immune system recognizes one disease, begins an immune response by producing a fever, then a discharge or eruption, and then resolution by developing lifelong immunity to a specific virus. HP produces a similar response yet in a much milder way. We might observe a very brief runny nose or perhaps a longer nap. However, there is no immune system confusion, no viral competition, no crossed signals, and no system overload like with conventional vaccines!



HP is made by serial dilution of an original substance, either from a natural disease or from an animal, mineral or vegetable source. It’s this stimulation to the immune system that primes it to recognize a disease when encountered in the environment to effectively mount an immune response in the most natural way.
 
There has never been a death from homeoprophylaxis, nor are there dangerous side effects. Large-scale observational studies have been conducted for the following diseases:

Leptospirosis in Cuba (2.5 million people)
Meningitis in Brazil (85,000 people)
Japanese encephalitis in India (20 million people)
Homeoprophylaxis is also effective for the prevention of childhood diseases as observed in 3500 children (Golden, Isaac. “Homeoprophylaxis-A Fifteen Year Clinical Study: A Statistical Review of Efficacy and Safety of Long Term Homeoprophylaxis. Gisborne. Vic. 2004).
When and Where to Use Homeoprophylaxis

There are 3 applications for HP –
Endemic disease (such as leptospirosis)
Short term epidemics (such as influenza)
Childhood diseases
For endemic disease there have been large studies (millions of people) and over time with annual dosing, the stats improve and disease incidence reduces significantly. In short term epidemics, like flu, you just dose for a few weeks/months until the risk is past.  For childhood disease there are single monthly doses for a period of about 3 years.  This includes 8 diseases that are on the recommended schedule that parents typically vaccinate for.  Protection begins immediately with the first dose and continues for a period of about 10 years. Re-doses can be administered in teen years or young adulthood depending on exposure to disease and risk of the specific disease.

For those traveling to foreign countries, HP is an easy and safe alternative to tropical disease vaccines. While some travel clinics will claim that you ‘must’ receive vaccines to travel, this is inaccurate. The only vaccine required to re-enter the US is yellow fever if you have visited a country where yellow fever is endemic. This information can be found on the CDC site under “travel” where you can click links to each country and learn of the yellow fever risk. All other vaccines for hepatitis, dengue fever, typhoid, malaria, and others can be declined and suitable HP doses can provide protection. Many of the studies already conducted have taken place in countries where these tropical epidemics exist.

To learn more the second international conference for parents and healthcare practitioners is taking place in St. Petersburg Florida, October 7-9, 2016.
Click here to find out the details:  worldwidechoice.org/conference

Healthy Living App

Environmental Working Group has a great website called Skin Deep that lets you search for over 60,000 products and rates them according to toxicity. Not only does the product get a score of 1-10 with 1 being the best for 1 is least toxic but it also scores each of the ingredients in the product telling you which ones are safe and which ones may cause cancer. Just type your product into the search box and see what comes up.

Many times I tell female patients to look at their makeup and see what products have titanium in them but ingredient lists are usually not on the product but the box that it came in that was thrown out a long time ago. So this website would be a great resource to see if there is titanium in your makeup.



They also have an app called Healthy Living that allows you to scan products and the info will then come up. It has been a lot of fun scanning my products at home. For example, I use Kiss My Face roll on deodorant in lavender that scores a 1. Interestingly only the lavender or fragrance-free scores a 1. The other scented roll ons score a 3 due to the fragrance they use and the deodorant sticks with fragrance score a 4. Who would have known? So next time you go shopping do some scanning first!

Here are some really safe, non-toxic products according to the Environmental Working Group.

Biossance™ THE REVITALIZER
isoi Bulgarian Rose MoisturiZIP
MyChelle Refining Sugar Cleanser
Sea Kind Elysium Serum
Silk Theraputics C Advance Anti-Aging Intensive Serum, Lemongrass
Silk Theraputics Nurture+, Silk+E Balanced Hydration
W3LL PEOPLE Bio Brightener Stick
W3LL PEOPLE Bio Bronzer Stick