If you do, or wish you knew more, we have a variety of nutrition resources that you may find useful:

• Our most extensive resource contains articles, arranged by condition, from the esteemed Alternative Medicine Review.

• Our Nutrition Section begins with the Supplement Section, providing non-solicitous information regarding the benefits of various vitamins, minerals and herbals.

• The Nutrient Depletion Charts reviews the nutrients depleted by a host of prescribed drugs.

I hope you will find these resources of value!

The following is taken from TheScientist.com’s Blog entry from Friday (09/18/2009) Posted by Margaret Guthrie:

“The book presents detailed nutritional information on food plants, including insight into hybridization and genetic modification, such as genetic engineering to reduce cell-wall softening in tomatoes, one of the world’s most popular “vegetables.” …… Details of vegetative components are given, along with analysis of “other biologically active substances” like antioxidants, flavonoids and tannins.

Not given over entirely to facts, charts and tables, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants also contains quirky passages that entertain as they illuminate. For example, nestled into the entry for spinach: “[Spinach] was reputed to have very high content of iron but this is a myth due to the incorrect placing of a decimal point in the calculations of Dr. von Wolf at the end of the nineteenth century, although recalculated in the 1930s.”

All in all, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants is an essential and engaging reference for everyone from casual readers and curious cooks to nutritionists and food writers. The book is due in bookstores on September 25.

The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, 2nd Edition, by J.G. Vaughan and C.A. Geissler, Oxford University Press USA, 2009. 288 pp. ISBN: 978-0-199-54946-7. $39.95.”

In the last year there has been a disappointing series of nutritional studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. JAMA was rabidly opposed to supplementation until 2002, when they finally published an excellent article that proposed that taking supplements could reduce the risk of chronic disease. [1] That article was right on the money. This recent group of articles challenges those findings, but you will soon find that they were all seriously flawed. Let’s review these clinical trials, and consider how asking the wrong question can yield the wrong answers, and how that process generates negative bias against supplementation. The first study we will discuss is the:

Physicians’ Health Study II

The first 2 JAMA papers we will review [2, 3] involve the results from the Physicians’ Health Study trial (PHS II). Researchers studied 14,641 male physicians in the United States, aged 50 years or older. They divided them into 4 groups, and gave most of them a placebo, while only 3,656 received both the 400 IU of vitamin E every other day and 500 mg of vitamin C daily. They tracked this group for 8 years. This trial generated 2 separate reports.

Continue reading …

The debate over using supplements vs. getting “all you need” from your diet has raged on for years. Competent medical advisers actually tell people they get everything they need from their diet. Seriously?

What exactly is the “minimum daily requirement” of vitamins? A quick review of the Food Guide Pyramid should make certain things clear:

1. All that recommended food only provides the MINIMUM vitamins required to avoid getting a vitamin dedficiency disease. WOW, great news. It is NOT enough for a growing child, pregnant woman, or ANYONE who is sick.

2. If you added ALL that food to a bucket around your neck, you’d have to graze all day to eat it all, just to get minimum amounts of vitamins. Unfortunately, demographic research suggests that leas than 10% of Americans eat that way. The rest of us suffer from “Morgan Spurlock Syndrome”.

Did you see the movie Superzize Me? Morgan Spurlock lived on fast food for 1 month, and during that time his health declined, and he went from being a healthy man to being
flabby-baby-man (as Ahnold would say).

So those of us who recommend supplementation do so to help people fill in the gaps in their diet.

The Nutrition Page is loaded with useful information about the health benefits associated with the use of vitamins, mineral, and herbals. It is presented in a non-solicitous fashion, to help you make informed decisions about your diet and health.

You may also find great value in the Alternative Medicine Approaches to Disease page, as it reviews a variety of conditions, and their response to holistic management. Virtually all of these articles are from Alternative Medicine Review, the premier alt-med journal.

Editorial Commentary:

In the last few months there has been a disappointing series of nutritional studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. JAMA was rabidly opposed to supplementation until 2002, when they published an excellent article that proposed that taking supplements could reduce the risk of chronic disease. [1] That article was right on the money. This recent group of articles challenges those findings, but you will soon find that they were all seriously flawed. Let’s review these clinical trials, and consider how asking the wrong question can yield the wrong answers, and how that process generates negative bias against supplementation.

Continue reading …

Do you make nutritional recommendations as part of your Care Plan? Do you recommend supplements? Do you carry supplements in your office?

Many chiropractic schools only provide a 3-credit class in nutrition, so students have to study on their own to develop confidence in offering recommendations.

Our Nutrition Section is an information rich and non-solicitous resource for you to learn more about supplementation and diet modification. The first section (Supplements) discusses specific vitamins and herbals.

I hope you will find this a useful resource!

A new study just revealed that stimulant medications, specifically methylphenidate, are associated with a 6- to 7-times increased risk for sudden death in children and adolescents. UGH!

What does the FDA say about that? “Given the limitation of this study’s methodology, the FDA is unable to conclude that these data affect the overall risk and benefit profile of stimulant medications used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity.”

The ADD/ADHD Page is devoted to the holistic approach…chiropractic care, dietary modification (no more food colorings and preservatives!), and no more dangerous drugs!

This is just one of many pages in the Pediatrics Section .

The Women’s Health Page contains a wealth of articles addressing fertility and menopausal issues.

It also links to the ADD/ADHD Page. This page discusses conservative management protocols, including chiropractic care and nutritional management.

There’s a lot more info like this in the Section

Our Pediatrics Section contains a wide variety of materials pertaining to children’s health.

The Kids Need Chiropractic, Too! page contains many articles by the profession’s foremost pediatric specialists.

The ADD/ADHD page reviews a natural approach to case management, including nutritional recommendations.

We hope you will find this resource of great value!

The whole point of nutritional supplementation should be about prevention, not reproducing the medical model of symptom treatment.

A new study involving 5,201 female U.S. Navy recruits puts this into clear perspective.

Half this group was given calcium and vitamin D supplementation during basic training, and the amazing result was a reduction of 25% in stress fractures. Considering that 21% of recruits usually experience a stress fracture, this is a huge deal for the Navy. Consider this: the average cost of a single soldier’s being discharged from basic training is estimated to be $34,000. By that standard alone, this study saved the Navy about 2.5 million dollars by reducing the discharge rate by 25%.

You will enjoy this vast collection of articles from the excellent Alternative Medicine Review journal. They are conveniently sorted by condition, so that you can review them quickly. Almost all categories give you immediate access to the FULL-TEXT article, in Adobe Acrobat format.

Because most of these articles involve nutritional supplementation as a component of case management, you may also want to refer to the Nutrition Section for more on that topic.

Although some of the e-mail I received lately regarding Resveratrol sounds like hyperbole, there is a lot of research demonstrating that resveratrol does switch on the SIR1 genes, thus extending lifespans in lower species.

Studies also show a favorable reduction in other health risks including diabetes, vascular disease, and various forms of cancer. So…the real question is…if you didn’t die (prematurely) from these “top killers”, would you live longer? Only time will tell.

Review the Nutrition Section for research supporting the use of other vitamins, minerals and herbs.