Sharing this article from Dr.Mercola, whom I learn a lot from. Read on about the power of plant based foods and how intermittent fasting can turn on your bodies fat burning switch. By Dr. Mercola The Hippocrates Health Institute, situated in southern Florida, is one of the worlds oldest complementary health centers. Dr. Brian Clement got started with the organization in 1975, and assumed directorship in 1980. He’s also the author of a three-volume series of academic books called, Food Is Medicine: The Scientific Evidence, reflecting on the work done at the Institute over the past six decades, combined with the empirical evidence coming out of research institutions such as Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, and Stanford. Dr. Clement is the medical director of the Hippocrates Health Institute. They offer residential programs lasting anywhere from one to three weeks, sometimes even longer. This allows you to learn, absorb, and help implement a new set of lifestyle strategies at a deep and lasting level. The Institute was founded by a woman named Anne Wigmore who, in 1952, was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Her doctors told her she had about three months left to live. “Well, thank goodness for her history,” Dr. Clement says. “In Europe, her grandmother was a village doctor. She saw her grandma, a natural doctor who used herbs and plants. She adopted that, healed herself, and reversed her cancer.” Upon her return to Boston, Massachusetts, Wigmore decided to share her experience and help others who were suffering debilitating and lethal diseases. And so the Hippocrates Health Institute was born in Boston in 1956. Today, six decades in business, the Institute is at the cutting edge in terms of using food and other lifestyle strategies as medicine. When Dr. Clement first joined the staff, he was sent off to Europe. “I spent three years there, bringing back the message of plant-based raw food diets and ran the original living food center called Humlegaarden – which was started more than 100 years ago in Denmark by Dr. Kristine Nolfi, who had reversed breast cancer with raw food... I came back in 1980 and assumed the directorship,” he says. What You Can Learn at the Hippocrates Health Institute Presently, about half of the Institute’s patients are interested in disease prevention. The other half are quite ill. People come from all over the world to learn how to improve and regain their health at this spa-style health retreat. As I said earlier, I had a chance to personally visit the Institute for a week, and it was truly a wonderful experience. One of the things I was particularly impressed with is the focus on raw foods, specifically sprouts. I usually eat six to eight ounces of sunflower seed sprouts a day. Four truly powerful nutritional approaches taught at the institute are: •Intermittent fasting and shifting from burning carbs to burning fat as your primary fuel •Eating live, raw foods, including lots of sprouts •Avoiding sugars, refined foods, and processed foods. They also advise avoiding all fruit juices and minimizing fruit initially •Shifting from poor quality protein to high-quality protein With respects to the latter, Dr. Clement explains: “... [E]ach and every one of those four aspects are clinically researched here, and we’ve established concrete empirical evidence on how they work, biochemically, in your body, [and] high-protein diets are major culprits. What we have seen recently, after 60 years and working with hundreds of thousands of people, is that when we reduce the amount of protein... and minimize the breakdown effect or digestion effect that your body requires to take this very dense nutrition and split it to amino acids, there’s health balance. Our colleagues in Europe have added another dimension... glycation [and] advanced glycation end products (AGEs). In Germany, they showed us that proteins, when bonding with sugars, actually created another structure. This structure is such an oddity, an enigma to the human biochemistry, that the immune system doesn’t know what to do with it. It runs rampant, actually causing cell death, producing free radicals. When we bond high-protein diets, certainly high-animal protein diets (although this could happen in high-soybean diets) and sugars (not only white sugar and red beet but agave syrup and way too many soy proteins), you end up killing cells and creating free radicals. That’s what glycation and AGE’s does.” Sprouts—Powerhouses of Nutrition In 1992, Johns Hopkins researched natural ways to squelch cancer. A diet high in cruciferous vegetables was identified as a factor that lowered the incidence. Additional research identified broccoli as having some of the most potent anti-cancer activity. Since then, when they finally looked into sprouted broccoli seeds, researchers discovered that the phytochemical in the sprouts killed cancer dozens of times more effectively than mature broccoli! The reason why they teach that sprouts are a core food at the Institute is because sprouts, depending on the variety, are anywhere from 10 to 30 times more nutritious than the best organic vegetables you can grow in the best organic soil in your yard. Sunflower seed and pea sprouts tend to top the list, in terms of their nutritional profile, each being typically about 30 times more nutritious than organic vegetables. While you can sprout a variety of different beans, nuts, seeds and grains, sprouts in general have the following beneficial attributes: •Support for cell regeneration •Powerful sources of antioxidants, minerals, vitamins and enzymes that protect against free radical damage •Alkalinizing effect on your body, which is thought to protect against disease, including cancer (as many tumors are acidic) •Abundantly rich in oxygen, which can also help protect against abnormal cell growth, viruses and bacteria that cannot survive in an oxygen-rich environment Phytonutrients, found in raw foods such as sprouts, are key for reversing disease with food. This is such a common-sense approach to health, yet the vision of so many people has been clouded by modern day living. “I’ll never forget Ann Wigmore... This woman was purely heart and instinct. That’s why she was correct almost always,” Dr. Clement says. “I was frustrating her because I was young and insecure and was, in a way, challenging her [to explain]: “How does this reverse disease?” She got frustrated one day and took a little organic sunflower seed, and said, “Don’t you realize if we put this to the ground, in seven weeks, it will be 12 to 15 feet-tall with thousands of seeds on it? That sunflower plant is going to be facing the east in the morning and facing the west at night. Now, don’t you think the power of the sunflower is that you’re taking hundreds and thousands of these, by eating them, and that juicing them is going to be good for you?” It’s the light force in the food that is even more important than the nutrients and the proteins... It is so overwhelmingly obvious that, whatever food choices you make, eat large amounts of green, fresh food.” Sprouts may in fact be one of the most obvious solutions to worldwide malnutrition and hunger due to poverty. They’re inexpensive and simple to grow, in virtually any climate when grown indoors, and can provide up to 30 times more nutrients than even organically grown vegetables! With barely any money at all, you can eat the healthiest of diets, year-round. Keeping seeds for sprouting is easy. Seeds are relatively simple to store and last for a long time. You also have to store FAR less food if you’re using seeds, as they don’t take up much space. I think it’s just a marvelous preparation strategy. The Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting One of the things I teach is that, for most people, it’s far healthier to skip breakfast. Omitting breakfast, as part of an intermittent fasting schedule, can have a number of phenomenal health benefits, from improving your insulin sensitivity to shifting your body into burning more fat instead of sugar for fuel. This will help you painlessly lose weight without being hungry as you will now finally have the ability to burn fat. The Hippocrates Institute has also more or less eliminated breakfast, serving only raw vegetable juices in the morning. This is basically intermittent fasting, even though it’s not being taught as that in the program. Intermittent fasting, also known as “scheduled eating,” does not necessarily mean abstaining from all food for extended periods of time. Rather it refers to limiting your eating to a narrow window of time each day. Ideally, you’ll want to limit your eating to a window of about 6-8 hours, say from noon until 6 or 8 pm each day, which means you’re fasting daily for 16-18 hours. This is enough to get your body to shift into fat-burning mode. This is a gradual process. Typically you start by not eating anything for three hours prior to going to sleep. This will give you a head start to the fasting process so if you sleep for 8 hours you’ve already fasted for 11 hours when you awake. The next step is to wait as long as you can before you start your first meal or “break” your fast. You can gradually extend the time that you have your first meal by 15 to 30 minutes a day. After several weeks you will be having your first meal at lunch. Typically, the more your body uses carbs as its primary fuel rather than fat, the longer this will take. Once you shift to fat burning mode, modern research has confirmed some of the benefits to be: •Normalizing your insulin sensitivity, which is key for optimal health as insulin resistance is a primary contributing factor to nearly all chronic disease, from diabetes to heart disease and even cancer •Normalizing ghrelin levels, also known as the hunger hormone •Promoting human growth hormone (HGH) production, which plays an important part in health, fitness and slowing the aging process •Lowering triglyceride levels •Reducing inflammation and lessening free radical damage Juice Your Vegetables Without Adding Fruit The Hippocrates Institute also provides and promotes raw vegetable juicing—but not the juicing of fruits. The reasons for this are manifold. According to Dr. Clement: “Seventy-five percent of raw food eaters today are sugar addicts trading white sugar for agave syrup; trading cakes for three mangoes or watermelons. You’re still a sugar addict... We’ve done empirical research on that. For 35 years, [sugar, including fruit] has been restricted here at Hippocrates in people with cancer.” If you have cancer and are in treatment, the Institute will tell you to eliminate all sugar, fruit juices and most fruit initially. Fruit juice is clearly worse than eating the whole fruit, since you’re then getting a high dose of fructose all at once, without any of the fiber. But even excessive whole fruit can be a problem for the vast majority of people today, especially if you’re struggling with your weight, insulin resistance, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease or cancer. Large amounts of fructose, especially for someone who’s insulin- and/or leptin-resistant, is not a good idea. Dr. Clement, however, believes that most people, with the exception of athletes, should avoid fruit. Remember, this is his position, not mine. I am just presenting it so you can evaluate it for yourself. Personally I believe that if you are fat adapted, fruit can be beneficial, especially if consumed before or after a workout where the sugar is consumed as a fuel and does not increase glycogen stores. His argument probably makes more sense for those who are insulin and/or leptin resistant, which happens to be the vast majority of the population
Posted on: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 14:05:38 +0000
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