Health Challenge: Convert your body to a Biscuit-Free Zone!

You really can improve your health by giving up eating biscuits. Just consider their many unhealthy ingredients: transfats/hydrogenated vegetable oil/partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, salt (yes, even sweet biscuits usually contain a lot of salt!), sugar, wheat flour. If you are overweight and you eat biscuits then I'm sure you know that the biscuits are contributing to the excess weight. But you may not know that the transfats in biscuits do not just contribute to overweight, they are actually toxic to the body because they do not exist in natural food and so your body cannot metabolise them in a normal way. They are added for commercial reasons to extend the shelf life of the biscuits. Sadly they do not extend the life of the people who eat the biscuits...)o:- Go on! - Try giving up biscuits! - You'll feel better for it!

Would your illness be alleviated/made less severe, or its progress retarded, by lowering your salt intake?

Would your illness/suffering/symptoms be relieved by lowering your salt intake? - The answer is YES if you are in one of these groups that are vulnerable to salt. - Check it out!

There are suggestions about ways to reduce salt intake on this Sodium in Foods page. I urge you to give it a try: there are so many health benefits from cutting down on salt - including reducing fluid retention/excess weight/obesity.

Improve your health by eating more like the hunter-gatherers and by avoiding added salt, and by avoiding pharmaceutical drugs

For millions of years our species ate what we might call for the sake of brevity a Stone Age diet. These 'hunter-gatherers' lived in the Paleolithic Age. We are separated in time from them by a 'mere' 10-12 thousand years. Our genes are our inheritance from those ancestors of ours, modified by natural selection over that geneological 'blink of a eye' since Neolithic, the New Stone Age, succeeded the old. This brought farming to the service of our kind. It was a mixed blessing: more food to feed more people, but a radical change of diet that caused some harm to the people who ate it.

The Paleolithic diet had mainly comprised meat, fish, nuts, non-starchy vegetables and fruit. The new foods of the Neolithic diet included cereals, i.e. grains. Grains make up such a large part of the modern day diet that it bears little resemblance to the hunter-gatherers' food of long ago and cannot logically be considered best suited to our species, the genes of which have not altered to suit it.

What 'food substance' have I not specifically mentioned? - SALT! - Salt is an even more recent newcomer to the modern diet. Humans started to eat added salt, it has been estimated, between 5,000 and 2,500 years ago, and in recent decades the food industry has, by adding copious amounts of salt to its processed foods, ensured that there wasn't a snowball's chance in Hell that our bodies could possibly adapt to so massive a change from the low sodium intake of our ancestors to the very high sodium intake of our societies today.

The outcome is that modern food is unsuitable for the health and nutrition of most people today and this partly explains the growing incidence of what we have come to think of as the new diseases of civilisation - diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, stroke, dementia, etc. And of obesity.

The even more recent scourge that is afflicting our species is the rapidly increasing ingestion of pharmaceutical drugs recklessly prescribed by an over-powerful medical profession, under-informed about the harm their prescriptions do to their unfortunate patients.

You could improve your health, rapidly and immediately, by seriously cutting down on your intake of salt and salty food, by cutting down on sugar and cereals/grains, and by avoiding prescription drugs unless they really are necessary. - Why not start in this way to improve your health this very day? - You have nothing to lose but excess weight, some avoidable pain, and the unnecessary risk of degenerative illnesses. - I wish you Good Health!

Come on, Asthma UK! - Tell people about the safe, easy to reduce their symptoms! - Just eat less salt and salty food!

Lowering Salt Intake reduces symptoms and increases lung function in people whose asthma is usually triggered by doing sports and physical activity

This article appeared on the website of Asthma UK almost 4 years ago. They don't seem to have given much publicity to the benefits of lowering salt/sodium intake since then. - It seems a shame not to.

***Note added May 2nd 2012: The link I have given above no longer works, and the article to which it refers appears to have been removed from AsthmaUK's website. That's a great shame. AsthmaUK is missing an opportunity to help asthma sufferers to reduce their symptoms and breathe more easily in a simple, cost-free way.

I suggest that AsthmaUK could have a page of low salt meal suggestions or recipes. This simple, safe, drug-free change to eating habits produces massive health benefits, not just to people with asthma. - Come on, Asthma UK! - Get telling people about how they can boost their lung function by cutting down on salt!

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, stroke, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, boost your lung function and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it!
 
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.ukThe site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

This evening I've been watching Ten Years Younger on Channel 4.

In case you've never seen the programme I'll explain that the format is that a person (usually it's a woman) who looks older than her real age is helped by several professionals to look younger, and the aim is for the person to look at least ten years younger.

The woman this evening had had all her teeth out at the early age of 18, and this had made her look much older - her cheeks sunken, her mouth sunken in despite her false teeth, her lips thin, her chin too prominent. She had also lost a lot of hair and this hair loss was what distressed her most.

Her loss of confidence had led to her giving up the effort to look her best using make-up, and clothes-wise. But she wants now to become a teacher and so felt the need to improve her looks and applied to the programme for help to do so.

It must be quite an ordeal and must take a lot of courage to be the subject of the programme, because we the viewers see the subject at her worst - sans teeth, sans hair, sans make-up, etc.

However, we also see the wonderful transformation as it takes place...(o:

This woman was operated upon by an excellent surgeon. He gave her face a chemical peel and a face lift. He reduced her nose and her chin and I think he also did something to the skin around her eyes. It all made a big difference.

A cosmetic dentist made her some (larger) cosmetic dentures and these looked very nice and filled out her face more.

The show's presenter, Nicky Hambleton-Jones, coaxed her into more up-to-date and flattering clothes, and a make-up expert gave her instruction in how to use make-up.

What I had never seen before was the fantastic work of a team of people who made her hair look fuller/thicker. - A net was put onto her hair and her hair was pulled through and additional human hair (not her own) was added, particularly at the front of her head, where the hair was very thin indeed. She also had her hair coloured in an attractive way.

She certainly did look younger - and happier, and more confident - as a result of the work done on her and it was nice to see her happiness and the pleasure of her family and friends.

If, Dear Reader, you happen to be very overweight/obese, and tired and fed up of looking fat and trying - and failing - to lose weight by dieting, I can tell you how to look ten years younger, how to improve the condition of your skin and your hair, how to improve your health and happiness, without the help of the Channel 4 programme and without surgery or dentistry or dieting or expense!

Here is what to do:

Overweight and obesity are initiated by fluid retention, and occur in people who are sensitive to salt/sodium. - To lose excess weight it is necessary to cut down on salt and salty food. - So instead of eating ready meals you need to cook a meal from fresh ingredients and use little or no salt to flavour it. - You could try using pepper or herbs instead of salt, or if you feel you cannot yet give up salt, then use one of the low sodium salt substitutes, e.g. LoSalt, Solo Low Sodium Sea Salt or AlsoSalt, instead of ordinary salt.

Lose weight by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

If you need my help, I can be contacted from my website. - My help is free.