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How Nutrition Can Truly Save Your Life

January 31, 2012 in ADD & ADHD, Nutrition, PSAs, Recommended, Tips for Parents, Training with 0 Comments

I love this story and it goes to show you how absolutely important nutrition is in our lives and the lives of our children. It’s powerful enough to bring a women suffering chronic disability from Multiple Sclerosis to healthy in less than a year.

The paleo diet she describes has also been shown to completely reverse type 2 Diabetes, ADHD, and other chronic diseases. Please watch this and then watch it again with your kids. It starts out a little slow but gets better and better each minute. It will truly save your life.

The New Michelle Obama-Inspired USDA Nutrition Guidelines Are a Joke

January 30, 2012 in ADD & ADHD, Nutrition, PSAs with 2 Comments

The USDA is playing you and your children for fools.

I got a chance to look over the highlights of the new USDA nutrition guidelines released last week and I’m far from impressed, though not surprised. The new guidelines are just as much of a joke as the old guidelines, with a few new punchlines. Oc course, they’re receiving praise from nearly everyone involved in CW (conventional wisdom) initiatives, the nutritionally misinformed medical community, and educators (who still haven’t figured out that kids will display ADD-like symptoms if you feed them SIWFMD (stuff I wouldn’t feed my dog) every day for lunch and then confine them to a desk).

Here’s a chart comparing the old nutrition guidelines with the new ones.

There are some decent aspects, such as a call for more vegetables. But, when you dig deeper and find out that pizza now classifies as a vegetable under Michelle Obama’s USDA guidelines, it’s hard not to get skeptical.

It also set a minimum for the amount of tomato sauce on pizza that could count toward vegetable servings.

Under pressure from potato growers and suppliers of school pizza, Congress weighed in and overruled the USDA on both counts.

The result: pizza now counts as a vegetable.

And then there’s an entire section dedicated to grains with an emphasis on whole grains. The USDA think it’s a great idea for kids to eat a poison-filled (Lectins, Gluten, and Phytates are naturally occurring poisons found in grains) substance that is unsuitable for human consumption unless it’s highly processed. It makes sense when you discover that wheat, rice, and corn are among the top five government-subsidized agricultural industries, but it’s sickening when you realize that they’re marketing the causes of childhood obesity and other medical problems to our kids as a healthy nutrition guideline.

Grains have zero nutritional benefits, being classified as an “anti-nutrient” by nutritional scientists who haven’t been paid off by the grain industry. I suggest you read more about why grains are unhealthy. In the meantime, here’s a synopsis of the three poisons found in the very grains the USDA wants your children to get plenty of:

Lectins. They bind to insulin receptors, attack the stomach lining of insects, bind to human intestinal lining, and they seemingly cause leptin resistance. And leptin resistance predicts a “worsening of the features of the metabolic syndrome independently of obesity”.

Gluten. Found in wheat, rye, and barley, Gluten is a composite of the proteins gliadin and glutenin. Around 1% of the population are celiacs, people who are completely and utterly intolerant of any gluten. In celiacs, any gluten in the diet can be disastrous. We’re talking compromised calcium and vitamin D3 levels, hyperparathyroidism, bone defects. Really terrible stuff. And it gets worse: just because you’re not celiac doesn’t mean you aren’t susceptible to the ravages of gluten. As Stephan highlights, one study showed that 29% of asymptomatic (read: not celiac) people nonetheless tested positive for anti-gliadin IgA in their stool. Anti-gliadin IgA is an antibody produced by the gut, and it remains there until it’s dispatched to ward off gliadin – a primary component of gluten. Basically, the only reason anti-gliadin IgA ends up in your stool is because your body sensed an impending threat – gluten. If gluten poses no threat, the anti-gliadin IgA stays in your gut. And to think, most Americans eat this stuff on a daily basis.

Phytates. They make minerals bio-unavailable (so much for all those healthy vitamins and minerals we need from whole grains!), thus rendering null and void the last, remaining argument for cereal grain consumption.

The USDA says that at least half of the grains must be whole grain-rich beginning July 1, 2012. Beginning July 1, 2014, all grains must be whole grain rich. That should be read as: “Beginning July 1, 2014 all grains must be the full-poison variety.”

We’re not done yet. The next category on the list is milk. And the new guidelines say that it must be fat-free (for flavored versions) or 1%. This is a nutritional disaster. From Doctor Mercola:

Milk is thought of as a wholesome food, which is why so many parents give it to their children with every meal. And the truth is, it is wholesome when it’s in its raw form and sourced from cows fed non-contaminated grass and raised in clean conditions.

Unfortunately, the milk that winds up in most Americans’ glasses is far from this unadulterated state and may be a veritable chemical cocktail containing as many as 20 painkillers, antibiotics, and growth hormones.

Drinking pasteurized 1% milk from hormone-drenched grain fed cows is no better than drinking sugar-water with some added chemicals (read: Coke). Of course, it passes not only as acceptable to USDA guidelines, but as a recommendation. And they think that adding chocolate syrup to this chemical-cocktail is perfectly fine as long as the milk is “fat-free.” Smh.

The USDA guidelines also make a push to limit saturated fat, a vital form of fat to human beings. In fact, saturated fats are good for you. The reason everyone believes otherwise is because the government (read: USDA) paid a scientist named Ancel Keyes a salary of $200,000 a year to convince people that there is a relationship between consumption of saturated fat, blood cholesterol levels, and risk of coronary heart disease.

Keyes’ most famous study, linking consumption of saturated fat with heart disease by country, was released in 1953. But, if you analyze the data that Keyes conveniently discarded from his own study, you find a result that directly contradicts Keyes’ published findings.

The research of Ancel Keys has been criticized by Uffe Ravnskov amongst others for having selection bias when supporting his conclusions. Ravnskov examined the data that Keys used and found no correlation to back up Keys’ findings.

The real causes of increased rates of heart disease and obesity is increased consumption of grains and hydrogenated oils. But the USDA says those are okay while telling you to not give your children saturated fats which are necessary for the optimal function of cell membranes, heart, bones (to assimilate calcium), liver, lungs, hormones, immune system, satiety (reducing hunger), and genetic regulation.

The new USDA guidelines, along with the USDA food pyramid are a prime example of why government should not be involved in this discussion or the health and wellbeing of our children. The findings and recommendations of the USDA are the result of politics, lobby money, and ignorance. And our children suffer while the USDA collect their money, protect their donors, and do the bidding of certain industries against others.

I choose not to be fooled. Nutrition is vital if you want to avoid joining the tribe of millions of fat, sick, and nearly dead people walking the globe. My daughter will be born this Summer and I will make sure she knows the difference between real food and the garbage everyone else eats.

Martial Arts & ADHD: A 90 Day Experiment for Success (and info for non-ADD students too!)

November 3, 2011 in ADD & ADHD, Discipline, Nutrition, Teaching, Tips for Parents with 2 Comments

Many of my students suffer from ADD symptoms and many are officially diagnosed. A large percentage of my ADD students came to me because their doctor recommended martial arts training to help them with structure, focus, self-control, and so on. After all, martial arts is branded as a perfect program that can help children in those areas.

Even if your child doesn’t have ADD, keep reading because this information will help all students.

Unfortunately, martial arts doesn’t cure ADD. Martial arts alone may not even improve it. It all depends on what the student and family are willing to do beyond martial arts training. There’s a secret weapon I recommend to all parents who seek my advice in this area. And no, doc, it’s not medication.

The medical community trains (and often rewards) doctors to prescribe medication as the first approach. I’ve taught tens of thousands of children over a decade in a dynamic physical and social environment. I also worked for half a decade as a pharmacy tech and got to talk to pharmacists who know the exact short and long-term effects of different medications on the human body. Those two experiences lead me to suggest that parents avoid medication as a first line of defense as there are alternatives that can be far more effective and less costly that you should try first.

So what’s the secret weapon?

Before your jump to medicate your child, please consider revamping their nutritional habits and see what effect it has on them. Don’t write me off, it’ll cost you nothing to do the following experiment and it may save you thousands of dollars in health care costs and may save your children years of not solving the core issue.

The fact is that the typical American diet is poisonous to long-term health. For developing children, it presents a road block to brain development and wreaks havoc on their physical, mental, social, and emotional well-being. When children fail to consume the core nutrients they need and instead consume empty, anti-nutritious fillers, chemicals, and poisons they become confined to a constant state of malnutrition and toxic response that–depending on the child–can manifest itself as a lack of focus, a surplus of energy, poor behavior, bad attitude, and so on.

When presented with those symptoms, doctors do two things: prescribe medication and suggest the parents bring the child to me. The fact is that unless we resolve the underlying issue, there’s little I can do. Medication alters the child’s behavior, but does nothing to quell the war his body is waging to fight against the constant assault from the toxins and anti-nutrients the child is consuming throughout the day. Even if the child doesn’t present ADD symptoms, poor nutrition negatively affects brain development, learning, and behavior. Revamping their nutrition can only promote improvement.

So what’s the experiment?

I want you to experiment with the following information for 90 days. If your child is already on medication, I cannot suggest you take them off, but will instead leave that decision up to you. If you’re thinking about putting your child on medication, try this experiment first. If your child doesn’t have ADD, try the experiment anyway and see what happens: there’s never a reason to knowingly give your child poison and that could very well be what you’re doing day in and day out.

I don’t have the room necessary to give you every detail and all the background information for every step in the experiment. It would make the post too long and you probably wouldn’t read it all anyway. Just try the experiment and then if you want more information you can email me.

Do this for 90 days…

  • Cut out all grain-based foods from your child’s diet. This is bread, pasta, rice, corn, wheat, etc. Grains are highly processed, toxic to animals, and full of anti-nutrients called Lectins and Phytates and a poison called Gluten.
  • Do not feed your child Gluten. It’s a poison designed to prevent animals from eating the grain it protects. It’s in a bunch of stuff; cutting out grains will help you avoid 98% of it but you should still proceed with caution.
  • Do not drink calories: no soda and no juice. Not even natural juice. One glass of orange juice has almost as much sugar as a can of Coke and more fructose than your child should consume in an entire day. Drink water only.
  • No sports drinks. They’re coke with different marketing. No fake sports drinks either (e.g. Powerade Zero), they’re full of chemicals. Again, water only.
  • Do not consume dairy. Even people who aren’t lactose intolerant can suffer negative side effects from dairy consumption. You have to cut it out to find out if it’s a problem. After 90 days, you can add it back in (but pasteurized dairy lacks nutrition anyway) slowly but keep an eye out for any strange symptoms.
  • Limit carbohydrate consumption to less than 150 grams per day. Most carb consumption should come from vegetables. If you remember ANYTHING, remember this: carb consumption = insulin = fat.
  • Limit sugar as much as possible. If you’re eating right, sugar is naturally limited as an issue unless you’re chowing down high-sugar fruits all day long. Even natural sugar is bad in excess. Your job is to limit insulin spikes (caused by too much of ANY kind of sugar intake).
  • Consume only high quality animal products. Steak, chicken, pork, eggs, bacon, etc. is all fine. If you want to go the extra mile, only consume grass-fed & finished beef and free range organic versions of the other animal products.
  • Limit your cooking oils to real butter (not margarine), avocado, or coconut oil. No hydrogenated oils. (Definitive guide to oils)
  • No caffeine.
  • Make sure your child gets at least 8 hours of sleep each night.
  • Let them play outside every chance they get.
  • Attend martial arts training at least three days per week.
  • Give them an Omega-3 supplement such as Barleans Fish Oil supplement (tastes amazing). The body cannot produce Omega 3 or 6 by itself, so it is essential that humans consume these fatty acids. It’s real brain food because Omega 3 is found primarily in the brain and the brain depends on it for cognitive and behavioral function. The typical American diet is very high in Omega 6 and very low in Omega 3. It’s important to balance that out.
  • Pack your child’s lunch every day. School cafeteria food is a nutritional disaster. It’s amazing how schools will feed kids dog food and then suggest that parents medicate the side effects.
  • If all that’s hard to remember, just print out this food pyramid and tape it to the fridge.

I know the experiment is difficult, it’s frustrating, and it’s a general PITA, but it’s absolutely worth it. With Thanksgiving and Christmas approaching, the task is even more difficult. But this isn’t about you, it’s about your child and their well-being. It’s time to take charge, do the uncomfortable thing, and force change.

Remember, you can always go back to chemicals, medications, and food ingredients that you can’t pronounce should you feel the need. But at the very least, give it a shot for 90 days of your life and see what happens. Oh, and if you actually do the experiment please email me with your results!!!