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Do you want to know if the food you are eating contains genetically modified ingredients?  I was made aware of a great blog this week that stays on top of the the topic of GMO foods. They put out a brochure that lists foods that may contain GMO ingredients, and also list alternatives that do not. The big food companies do not want us to know that their food is GMO, because they know that many people won’t buy their food if the truth gets out, and because legally they are not obligated to tell us on the label, they simply keep it a secret.

As consumers we have a huge amount of power to determine what food is in the market place by what we buy. So, let’s stop this giant experiment on our health. The food companies have NOT obtained informed consent from the populace on this issue, and we are being experimented on without our knowledge because until now, we had no way of knowing which foods were GMO and which were not. The only way to be sure of avoiding genetically modified food was to buy organic. And there is enough research out there to be at least a little bit concerned for what may happen to our health by consuming GMO food, and to be very concerned about the impacts on the planet. Who knows if 50 years from now we will look back on the GMO experiment the same way we are now looking back at the spraying of Agent Orange / Agent Purple, and the effects on the Vietnam Vets, Canadians at CFB Gagetown and elsewhere, and others world wide, who did not know they were being exposed to cancer-causing chemicals at the time.

Click here for a Genetically-Modified Processed And Whole Foods List. For the fruits and vegetables you can tell by the produce number if in fact the item is GMO. If the number is 5 digits long and begins with the number 8, the product is GMO.

Related Tips
Genetically Modified Foods – Crossing the species barrier
Deceptive Food Labels

Garcia, Deborah Koons;The Future of Food DVD, Cinema Libre Studio, CA, 2005.

www.wellnesstips.ca

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Just as many of us need "light therapy" in order to cope with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), I would bet that many more of us actually need "dark therapy", and some of us probably could use a combination of both.  In today’s world, we often don’t spend much time outdoors in the day, and we tend to live by artificial light at night.

Every cell of our body is sensitive to light and darkness, and now that we no longer tend to live according to the rising and setting sun, our health is suffering.

Melatonin, synthesized from the neurotransmitter serotonin and secreted by the pineal gland in the brain, is one of the victims of our current modern lifestyle. It has a big job to do – to help us recuperate from our day, and prepare us for tomorrow.

It is activated by darkness and inhibited by light, so before the invention of the light bulb when we actually lived according to the cycles of daylight and darkness, melatonin had adequate time to get its nightly job done. When it gets dark outside, it is supposed to be “melatonin time”.

Turning on the lights at night and staying up late tricks our body into thinking it is day, keeping the day hormone levels (like cortisol) higher. Then, when we finally go to bed and turn out the lights, melatonin may not have enough time to do its job before daybreak.

And if the bedroom is not completely dark – an outdoor street lamp is shining through the window onto our skin for example, melatonin may not be activated at all.

This is why working night-shift is so devastating to health.  Many scientists believe that inadequate melatonin is a primary cause of many diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer, because then there is nothing to stop the run-away train that too much stress causes in the body.

The light of yang is no longer balanced by the dark of yin hormonally (cortisol / melatonin), in the CNS (sympathetic / parasympathetic), psychologically (stressed / relaxed) and even on a societal level (work / play). Work and productivity are valued highly in our society, whereas people that live a more balanced life are often considered "slackers" or lazy.

Melatonin is a very powerful antioxidant that works in watery as well as fatty environments, and unlike other antioxidants, melatonin is able to cross the blood brain barrier.  So, at night, melatonin’s job is to sop up those free radicals before they do too much damage to other tissues.

Melatonin helps control the menstrual cycle in females, controls estrogen levels (thereby playing a key roll in preventing hormonal cancers like breast, ovarian, uterine and even prostate cancer), and is important in controlling circadian rhythms.

Melatonin is also synthesized by the immune system for its many roles within that system, including enhancing T cell production. Melatonin even seems to be involved in regenerating injured tissue, as seen in this study on rat degenerated intervertebral disks.

Melatonin, among other things, helps us sleep (or is supposed to!)

As someone who has a real problem sleeping, I completely disagree with the advice frequently given to insomniacs to get up, get out of the bedroom and read or do something if one can’t sleep because that would entail turning on a light, which would then shut down melatonin, resulting in less rest and repair happening.

Getting up certainly won’t help you get to sleep! I know from experience what putting in a full day of work feels like after lying in bed awake from 10pm to 7am, but turning on a light I think will just mess up the hormones more. You certainly don’t want to fire up cortisol at 2 in the morning!

Listening to relaxation CDs may be helpful. What helped me enormously when I wasn’t sleeping four out of seven nights for months on end, was listening to the relaxing Insight CD, which lowered my brain waves to delta, so even though I wasn’t sleeping, I was getting some rest. I honestly think that without that CD I would have had to cancel many a work day.

If you suffer from insomnia, it may be very tempting to rely on melatonin supplements to help you sleep. Personally, I think that apart from very occasional use to aid in jet-lag recovery, this is a bad idea because if you are providing external melatonin, your body will sense it in the blood stream and stop producing it.

Over time your pineal gland will shrink, and you may no longer be able to produce your own melatonin, which would leave you stuck taking the supplement for life. Far better to decrease sympathetic load (reduce your stressors), get lots of light during the day, and then lots of dark time at night.

Frequently addressing cortisol circadian-rhythm problems will also make a big difference, as high cortisol levels at night make it pretty hard to sleep! (Small aside, for those of you are keeping track – cortisol does not suppress melatonin, but melatonin does not suppress cortisol either.

That means you can have high cortisol levels when its dark and you are lying awake stressing, but melatonin is not active when it’s light. Therefore, cortisol is still the kingpin, as it is functional 24/7.)

In the winter time especially, our bodies probably need a good 9.5 hours in complete darkness.  No light, TV sets, computers or night lights at all. Get that TV out of the bedroom! 

That does not mean that we must be in bed sleeping for that length of time – dark time can provide an opportunity for meditation, contemplation or listening to music for example. This way it is easier to quiet the mind before trying to sleep.

If in the night you need to use the bathroom, don’t turn on the bathroom light. Use a red night light (not white, blue or green), or a flashlight with a red bulb.

Black-out drapes can make a huge difference to the darkness of a bedroom, or in a pinch you can put foil on the windows. Many people have said that they didn’t realize they were sleeping poorly until they slept in a completely darkened room.

Related Tips
Breast / prostate cancer prevention
Light pollution messes with your hormones
Is going to bed too late making you fat?
The autonomic nervous system and fat loss
Adrenal fatigue

Formby and Wiley; Lights Out! Sugar, Sleep and Survival Books, New York, NY, 2000

www.wellnesstips.ca

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In a previous tip I discussed the problems with the proposal to pasteurize almonds. And for a while there I thought we were going to get a reprieve – that they would delay the mandate to have all almonds sterilized until March 2008, giving us time to change their minds about this bad idea. But, no, the rule that all US almonds, whether organic or not, must be sterilized went into effect Sept. 1st, which means that ALL ALMONDS SOLD THE US AND CANADA have either been doused in the carcinogenic chemical propylene oxide or have been heat treated, even if the label says the almonds are raw.

So, Sept. 1, 2007, marks another day where our food supply was further degraded. The Almond Board of California assures us that the nutrition in the chemically or heat treated almonds has not been altered, but as Mike Adams states so eloquently in his article Food Scam: Almond Board of California to falsely label “pasteurized” almonds as raw, "Except, of course, for the fact that they are dead. Stating that live, raw almonds are the same as dead, cooked almonds is equivalent to stating that a living human being is the same as a corpse." So, that means that if you were to plant the almond, it won’t grow. It means that the enzymes in the nut that spare our pancreas from the extra work of manufacturing and secreting those enzymes needed for digestion, have been destroyed. Maybe "enzymes" are not considered "nutrients" officially, but there is no doubt that enzymes in the raw food that we eat reduces the workload of our digestive system.

Heat also damages most water-soluble vitamins, and oxidizes polyunsaturated fatty acids.  Raw almonds are an excellent source of omega 6 polyunsaturated fats, but once the almonds are heat treated, those omega 6 fats are rancid.  And if the "raw" almonds you happen to buy are the ones that were sterilized with propylene oxide, you are now consuming a toxin that your liver is saddled with trying to detoxify.  Neither of these options are good for our health!  How the Almond Board of California can say that the nutrition and quality of the almonds remains unaltered is a mystery to me.

So, further down the slippery slope we go.  What is next?  Are we soon only going to be able to buy hard-boiled eggs? Cooked vegetables and meat?  Already it is next to impossible for most of us to obtain uncooked milk from pasture-fed cows. As more and more of our food is sterilized in the name of food safety, we will get sicker and sicker as the nutrition in our food supply is further eroded, and our digestive systems go into overdrive trying to provide enzymes that used to be in the food.  Our immune systems will further erode due to the lack of "good" bacteria, making us sitting ducks for disease.

I am not suggesting that food-borne illness is not an important issue that needs to be addressed.  I simply think that the way to deal with it is to discourage commercial farming methods that tend to have a bigger problem with contamination. Solve the problem at the source rather than try and cover one’s butt by sterilizing everything afterwards.

If we wish to avoid almonds that have been doused by the carcinogenic chemical propylene oxide or have been heat treated, we have two choices. If you are lucky enough to live in California where the almonds are grown, you can purchase them raw from roadside stands. For the rest of us, we must turn to European almonds.  We can order them from www.realrawfood.com and also I believe www.livingnutz.com is no longer selling US grown almonds, and is getting raw ones from Europe. I would ask them though, as their website is not clear on this topic. Or we can buy walnuts instead – they are still a raw choice, and they are high in omega 3 fatty acids, which is a bonus. If enough people stop buying US almonds, the almond industry will respond. It is important to keep making a fuss about this, rather than accept this as a done deal. So do sign the petition call, fax and email the almond producers, the USDA and the FDA. A list of names and addresses is at the bottom of this page for whom to contact on this matter.

Related Tips:
“Pasteurized” almonds labeled as raw
The hygiene hypothesis
Deceptive food labeling
Food, our raw material
It’s not what you eat but what you digest that counts
Maintain bone mass by preparing grains, nuts and seeds properly

Online at Almond Board of California

www.wellnesstips.ca