Acai Assault: The Acai Berry may Regulate Cholesterol

Acai Assault: The Acai Berry may Regulate Cholesterol
by Frank Mangano


(NaturalNews) The laundry list of acai berry benefits to the body just got a bit longer. According to a recent study published in the journal Nutrition, the awkward-to-pronounce berry is great for cholesterol regulation.

There's no shortage of health claims when it comes to the acai berry (pronounced ah-sigh-EE, not ack-EYE), the berry that's been billed as the "Superfood of superfoods" by doctors and nutritionists alike. From better digestion to improved circulation, the acai berry could very well be the "berry best" in a family that's already bursting with nutritional heavyweights.

The latest study to tout the acai berry's benefits comes out of Brazil, the berry's native land, where the pulp of acai was fed to two groups of rats. One of the groups had a standard rat diet, while the other had a high fat diet. The remaining rats had high fat diets but without the accompanying acai (there were four groupings of rats).

After six weeks of observation, the researchers found distinct differences in the blood work of the rats that supplemented with the acai and those that didn't. Both acai supplementing groups had improvements in their cholesterol profile, but what really took the researchers by surprise was that the high fat rats had the best cholesterol profile (i.e., total cholesterol levels AND non-HDL levels dropped).

The researchers believe the acai berry was the catalyst, but it could also have been due to the fact that those fed the high fat diet consumed less food in terms of quantity (i.e., less food consumed, but more calories consumed).

Granted, this test was performed on rats, but observers of the study have every reason to suspect that the results can be translated to humans. More long-term studies are in the offing.

The acai berry is not something you'll find nestled next to blueberries or strawberries at your local farmer's market. Ninety percent of the berry is the pit, which may explain why you've seen people drinking acai berry juice but not eating the actual berry. But what an acai berry lacks in plumpness, it makes up for in nutrients. The flesh of one acai berry has 10 times the antioxidant content found in a grape, and two times the antioxidant content found in a blueberry.

What is relative humidity and how does it affect how I feel outside?

What is relative humidity and how does it affect how I feel outside?

If the air is at 100-percent relative humidity, sweat will not evaporate into the air. As a result, we feel much hotter than the actual temperature when the relative humidity is high.

Humidity is somethi ng we hear about daily in weather reports. Humidity is to blame for that muggy, steam-room feeling you experience on certain summer days.

Humidity can be measured in several ways, but relative humidity is the most common. In order to understand relative humidity, it is helpful to first understand absolute humidity.

Absolute humidity is the mass of water vapor divided by the mass of dry air in a volume of air at a given temperature. The hotter the air is, the more water it can contain.

Relative humidity is the ratio of the current absolute humidity to the highest possible absolute humidity (which depends on the current air temperature). A reading of 100 percent relative humidity means that the air is totally saturated with water vapor and cannot hold any more, creating the possibility of rain. This doesn't mean that the relative humidity must be 100 percent in order for it to rain -- it must be 100 percent where the clouds are forming, but the relative humidity near the ground could be much less.

Humans are very sensitive to humidity, as the skin relies on the air to get rid of moisture. The process of sweating is your body's attempt to keep cool and maintain its current temperature. If the air is at 100-percent relative humidity, sweat will not evaporate into the air. As a result, we feel much hotter than the actual temperature when the relative humidity is high. If the relative humidity is low, we can feel much cooler than the actual temperature because our sweat evaporates easily, cooling us off. For example, if the air temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius) and the relative humidity is zero percent, the air temperature feels like 69 degrees Fahrenheit (21 C) to our bodies. If the air temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 C) and the relative humidity is 100 percent, we feel like it's 80 degrees (27 C) out.

People tend to feel most comfortable at a relative humidity of about 45 percent. Humidifiers and dehumidifiers help to keep indoor humidity at a comfortable level.

Author and Nutritionist David Wolfe Discusses Nutritional Myths

Author and Nutritionist David Wolfe Discusses Nutritional Myths

By Kevin Gianni

Sunfood Nutrition

Kevin: Let's take another turn here and let's talk a little bit about some of the common things that people are experiencing nowadays and maybe if you can just give some suggestions on what they can do to help them out. I know that, to start, we'll start with osteoporosis. A lot of women are concerned about osteoporosis and they're concerned about calcium and taking these calcium pills. You know, what are some of the pros and cons of that?

David: Okay, well the nations that consume the most calcium, the United States, Canada and the Scandinavian countries, have the worse osteoporosis and that's because our theory of mineralization or our theory of nutrition is incorrect.

The general theory is that a hundred years ago they started looking at people's bones. They found out that, oh my god; these bones are made out of calcium. When people don't have enough bone density the thought is, oh they just have to eat more calcium because that's what builds bones.

Calcium does not build bones and that is one of the biggest misconceptions ever and it actually goes to the real core of our problems with science. And that is the human body is a complex biological machine of an unbelievable of mystery.

And there is strong evidence that indicates that if you eat some of the calcium, let's say it's calcium from coral calcium, for example, oyster shell calcium. That it is almost impossible to get that stuff into your bones to increase bone density. The amount of increasing bone density, at best, is 1 or 2%. It is not good enough.

What increases bone density? Well, it turns out it's two other minerals and that is silicon and magnesium. Now, the best natural source of magnesium is cacao and cacao is known to be good for your teeth. In fact, there are chemicals in cacao that kill the organism Streptococci mutans that cause cavities. And, in fact, those extracts of the chocolate are now going to be showing up in toothpaste all over the world.

Kevin: No kidding?

David: That's amazing. That to me is just such a dramatic irony.

Kevin: Wow.

Wolfe: All along chocolate has been good for your teeth. It's the sugar that's been bad but even then, studies have been done on people who eat chocolate even with the sugar and it's been found with a study done in Scandinavia on this.

It's been found that even then that people who eat chocolate have been teeth health than people who don't. To me that's amazing. But let's get on to silicon because this is the mineral that is difficult to get in today's diet. What is silicon? It's a mineral. You get it in the skin of cucumbers. It's in the skin of bell peppers. It's the skin of tomatoes. It's in certain special herbs, which I'm going to name and you can drink this as a tea or take it in supplemental form and you will notice that it helps with your bone density.

And here are the herbs. One of them is called horse tail, horse tail and it's not a horse's tail. It's actually an herb. Another one is nettle. Stinging nettles have been eaten by the druids in the U.K. for thousands of years and it's one of the most important foods to eat if you know how to do it or if you juice it or you can just dry it and make a tea out of it, which is what I'm recommending; horse tail, nettle, oat straw. The oat seed of the oat grass has a little straw around it. It has a little coating. It's the seed capsule. That oat straw is one of the richest sources of silicon. You can buy it in health food stores. You can get in as extracts in health food stores.

You can get it raw and make your own tea out of it. You combine those three together and you want you can add alfalfa, which is also a great source of silicon. You can either make a tea out of that or you can just eat those any way you can find them. And you will find if you do three strong teas of that per day you will start increasing your bone density but how? It's the silicon.

Now, how does silicon increase calcium? I mean that doesn't make sense. It's because our theory of minerals is incorrect. Our atomic theory is incorrect. And that is if you eat silicon rich food your body, through the power of enzymes transmutates it into calcium, turns the silicon into calcium. That was discovered by a great French researcher by the name of Louis Curvan, a Nobel prize nominee, who wrote five books and 5,000 pages of research on just this particular subject; how silicon and calcium are related to each other.

It was very well honored in France and he is very intimately entwined in the science of what's going on in France; but because of the language barrier his research really never made it to the English-speaking nations.

Kevin: Interesting when we're still taking calcium pills from, you know, sea shells and everything.

David: I recommend to god, you know, this is so engrained in our minds about calcium that if you are confused about this, get on the Internet and research exactly whose getting the results of remineralizing their bones and you'll find it's people who are not taking these forms of calcium that are toxic, which is the oyster shell calcium and to some degree even coral calcium.

Kevin: Now, bones are alkaline and doesn't the acidity of meats and sugars - does that eat away at the bone? I mean has that been proven or is that just a theory that I think I have, you know?

David: Well, that's a great question and that's the other side of the equation about osteoporosis. One is we've got to make sure we get the right nutrition to build strong bones. The other side of the equation is we've got to make sure we are doing things that aren't hurting our bones.

Eating lots of sugar is one of the worse things we can do to our overall health of our teeth, which are living bones and to the density of our bones because when we take in lots of sugar our body has to use calcium, it has to pull calcium out of the bones to buffer or neutralize the intense acidity of the sugar.

Calcium is highly alkaline, as you stated. Our bones are alkaline and, therefore, alkaline minerals are used whenever we're exposed to real strong acids. Sugar is a very strong acid. I mean, you know, we used to dissolve the corrosion on our battery terminals of our bus by dumping soda pop onto it because that sugar just dissolves and the phosphoric acid just dissolves all the corrosion right on the battery terminal. I mean you don't' want to be putting that in your body. That's dangerous.

Kevin: Let's get into supplements little bit. And you walk into a health food store and there are literally thousands of them. How do you get through them to find the ones that help with weight loss, and longevity, is really what I think the fountain of youth is all about?

Which ones of those are the best? I mean rhodiola, turmeric, cinnamon. I mean which ones are the ones that people should be focusing on, not necessarily take but should be focusing on?

David: That's such an excellent question. My job is to basically guide people into health food stores and create order out of chaos. There are so many things. Okay, well the most important thing, in my opinion, that you can buy in a health food store in that department is going to be vitamin C.

Kevin: Okay. In what form?

David: Well, there's different forms. Now, I recommend that you start experimenting, moving away from synthetic forms of vitamin C or ascorbic acid, which is still beneficial, still good for you, and moving towards powdered, really high vitamin C plants. For example, you can get acerola cherry. It's a tropical berry that is really high in vitamin C.

It's like 1 or 2% vitamin C and basically what they do is they grow these berries. They dry them and they powder them down and the encapsulate them or put them in a glass jar and sell them in health food stores as vitamin C.

Now, that's a real great way to get lots of vitamin C natural with all the cofactors. Vitamin C needs cofactors like rutin and bioflavonoids that are all naturally present in those powders, like acerola cherry. You can either take it supplementally as capsules or you add it onto your smoothies. You can literally put it in your water that you drink in your morning and it kind of sweetens the water. It sweetens the water but doesn't sugarize the water.

Kevin: Gotcha.

David: Vitamin C is sweet but not sugary. So it makes your morning water easier to drink. So that's one thing, vitamin C. The next thing is, what I believe to be, the greatest discovery in the last -- probably in the last hundred years in the field of nutrition other than vitamin C and enzymes and that is sulfur, MSM, Methylsulfonylmethane.

MSM is a biologically available form of sulfur that's naturally found in wild food, untended food. We don't really have access to that hardly at all any more. I mean, almost all our food is grown on farms for us. It's not being watered naturally by the rain. I'm talking about the natural sulfur that's produced in the oceans that helps create clouds, then drops them on the land that we need nutritionally in order to produce flexible collagen. Now that in the world does that mean? It means that sulfur produces flexible skin and flexible muscle tissue. It stops, in essence, wrinkling and increases the juiciness of the collagen and the discs, the joints that basically separate our bones from each other. On top of all that, it increases the growth of our hair, our nails, so that we have thicker, richer growth of our hair and nails. This can all be easily experienced within two weeks of taking MSM.

Kevin: It's going to grow like weeds.

David: It's really incredible and people who want thick quick growth of their hair and nails are almost always completely shocked by how powerful MSM can be. You can get it in capsule form. You can get it in a powder form. It's available in every single health food store now.

Once you start looking into it, and especially when you take it, here's what you're going to find out. You're going to find it's one of the most important things you've ever taken. I have randomly polled hundreds of people about MSM. I almost always to a T here from people who have taken it before. Oh, MSM changed my life. I've heard that dozens of times, that exact quote. Oh, MSM changed my life.

Kevin Gianni the host of Renegade Health Show - a fun and informative daily health show that is changing the perception of health across the world. His is an internationally known health advocate, author, and film consultant. He has helped thousands and thousands of people in over 21 countries though online health teleseminars about abundance, optimum health and longevity. He is also the creator and co-author of The Busy Person's Fitness Solution