Ask Dr Dzung Price » General Health

Insidious Non-Alcoholic Cause of Liver Disease

Dr Dzung Price — Fri, 07 May 2010 22:44:43 +0000

Do you know about the insidious non-alcohol factor in fatty liver disease? Insidious because it’s hidden in popular soft drinks and many packaged foods, is not considered a toxin, yet is known by researchers to be very harmful to your health.

What is this ingredient? Fructose, especially high fructose corn syrup which is found in soft drinks, sodas and many bottled juices.

Fructose is lipogenic, which means it turns even non-fat foods into body fat. It makes you fat, which can affect all parts of your body. It also promotes inflammation in the body. Inflammation a major factor in almost every modern disease, including allergies. It also increases the risk of obesity and fatty liver disease. A vicious circle, isn’t it?

Think about that when you next reach for a soft drink or bottled juice. Choose fresh juices instead, or just plain clean water. Your liver will love you for it.

Protecting against Prostate Cancer

Dr Dzung Price — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:47:54 +0000

Years of accumulated toxins such as chemicals, infectants and heavy metals can cause glands such as the prostate gland to prematurely deteriorate as if from advanced age. One way toxins do this is by changing the body’s environment, making it more acidic, which creates an ideal environment for free radicals and the growth of cancerous cells, as well as for parasites and other pathogens.

The only way to avoid these toxic effects on the prostate is through detoxification. You can do this naturally by eating lots of fresh, pesticide-free vegetables and fruits, drinking lots of filtered or good spring water (tea, coffee and juices do not count), exerising every day and keeping your home as free as possible of food additives and environmental and domestic chemicals. Also, avoid cigarette smoke as it contains high levels of radioactive elements.

If your past diet and environment has been less than pristine, or you were regularly exposed to car, petrol or other toxic fumes; cleaning agents; farm chemicals or other toxins in your home or workplace, then your body will need help getting rid of accumulated toxins.

Research has shown that lymphatic detoxification helps prevent prostate cancer and breast cancer. By helping the body eliminate acidifying toxins more quickly, lymphatic detoxification helps to restore your body’s pH to more alkaline condition. This enables the growth of the beneficial intestinal bacteria (flora) which play an important role in protecting your body from infection, parasites and inflammation, and also creates an inner environment that inhibits the growth of cancer cells.

Vit C Helps Prevent Type 2 Diabetes

Dr Dzung Price — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:20:36 +0000

A U.S. study found that Eating just one more serving of green leafy vegetables or three more servings of fruit a day reduces the risk of developing Type II diabetes. Dark green lettuce, silverbeet, spinach, kale and whole fresh fruits are our best sources of vitamin C and natural fibre.

According to more recent research, adults with the highest levels of vitamin C are 60% less likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those with the lowest levels of vitamin C. That’s a very good reason to eat less cereals and potatoes and make fresh fruits and vegetables the major part of your daily diet.

Other than giving fruits a good wash to remove traces of pesticides, eat them as nature provided them. Most vegetables can be eaten raw, or if you cook them, don’t overdo it: lightly steamed or quickly stir fried vegetables retain more nutrients and useful fibre.

If you in the diabetes risk group, take note: Fruit juices, even those you squeeze yourself, are not the same thing as fresh fruit.

Juices dump loads of sugar into the body fast, whereas whole fruits also provide unrefined natural fibre that helps pace the absorbtion and digestion of sugar and nutrients. In fact, research showed that drinking just one fruit juice a day increased the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Are You Missing Out on Natures Powerful Disease-Busters?

Dr Dzung Price — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:33:13 +0000

For years, I’ve been advising my patients to eat a Rainbow Diet, that is, a diet based on a wide variety of fruits and vegetables of all colours. Why? Because the natural colour in plant foods is provided by chemical compounds known as Phytochemicals, and these compounds have been found to provided enormous health benefits.

Phytonutrients protect your body’s cells, keep you youthful, cleanse your insides of toxins, strengthen your organs, and prevent and fight major diseases such as cancer, autoimmune diseases and cardiac disease. In addition to that, when you eat more phytonutrients, your body is getting more of the nutrients it needs to function at its peak and give you loads of energy.

Yet most of us just don’t eat enough of the foods that are rich in phytonutrients. Some of us stick to the same familiar foods – apples, carrots, perhaps a few greens now and then. Some people hardly even do that, or if they do eat plant foods, they’re so processed and overcooked that the food’s just plain dead.

If that’s you, then you’re missing out on some powerful protection. Here are just a few of the valuable phytonutrients you could be getting from Nature’s rainbow larder:

Chlorophyll – essential for all plant life, this compound is a powerful detoxifier, cell rejuvenator and energizer. It also protects genes from damage that leads to cancers. Found in wheat grass, spirulina, barley grass and leafy greens.

Ellagic acid – In a 9 year study, the Hollings Cancer Institute at the University of South Carolina found that this Ellagic acid is inhibited cancer cell division with 48 hours, and normal cell death within 72 hours for breast, pancreas, oesophageal, skin, colon and prostate cancer cells. This cancer-preventing compound is found in pomegranates, grapes, raspberries, and strawberries. Glutathione – a powerful immune regenerator that is essential for liver health and maintaining your DNA found in red foods like watermelon and green foods like asparagus

Lycopene – this cancer-fighting compound that also benefits the heart is found in tomatoes, guava, papaya, pink grapefruit, watermelon and rosehips

Quercetin – an anti-inflammatory antioxidant that has been used to treat cancer, prostatitis, heart disease, cataracts, and respiratory diseases like bronchitis and asthma. A study in the British Journal of Cancer reported that skin and prostate cancers treated with quercetin and resulted in 90% death of the cancer cells within 48 hours. Quercetin is found in many foods, including apples, citrus, onions, grapes, broccoli, leafy green vegetables, cherries, cranberries and turmeric

Resveratrol – this compound helps prevent cancer and inhibits the progression of existing cancers, and also reduces the risk of age-related diseases. Research at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Ohio State University found that resveratrol can also help to inhibit cardiac disease. Find high levels of resveratrol in the skin of purple/red grapes (especially Muscatel grapes), blueberries, raspberries, mulberries, bilberries, and cranberries.

As you can see, a colourful, varied diet is not a luxury. It’s vital to your and your family’s health and wellbeing. And to ensure you’re getting the very best protection from disease without toxic pesticides and additives, eat what’s in season and grown as close to home as you can find…if possible, organic.

Your Health Journey Starts Here!

Dr Dzung Price — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:07:21 +0000

As a health practitioner with enormous faith in the body’s natural ability to maintain and heal itself, I am still surprised to find how many people don’t recognise illness or unwellness in its early stages, when the problems are small and easily taken care of. Instead, they wait until their condition interferes with their lifestyle, or causes significant distress, then rush to the health practitioner looking for answers.

Most people, including most doctors, only pay attention to health after illness has set in. This is really the worst time to do it, because by that time, many things have gone wrong inside the body. By the time they get your attention, symptoms can occur far away from the source of the problem, so you might, for example, get heart palpitations when the real problem is infection deep within your gums.

To know that you are not healthy, you must first have an idea of what it is to be healthy.

So what is health?

Health is a state of homeostasis or balance. Changes occur in the body as part of everyday life, then things settle down. Tissues are damaged or worn out, and are repaired or replaced. Hormones and other chemicals are rushed to parts of the body where they are needed, then they are eliminated safely when they have done their work. The body corrects or eliminates some problems with a temporary fever, inflammation or brief illness, then brings itself back to a healthful condition. All this happens quite naturally in a healthy body, without any conscious effort on your part. In an unhealthy body, the balance is not restored, and small changes grow into problems.

A healthy body can easily recover from negative influences, such as stress, illness or normal amounts of toxins. If your body is not able to regain its balance or cope with outside influences, the result is illness or disease. Sometimes, the body eventually recovers without assistance, though soemetimes, even a healthy body needs our assistance to bring it back into balance. An unhealthy body, on the other hand, will not bounce back or recover on its own.

Health is a state of balance between body and mind.Your thoughts and feelings have a profound effect on your physical health, and the other way around. If the mind is out of balance – too stressed, overly negative, or carrying harmful beliefs (such as ‘I’m a sickly person’, ‘Illness is an inevitable part of aging’, or ‘I don’tdeserve happiness’) – then the body falls out of balance, and illness occurs. If you are often unhappy, depressed, anxious or angry, you can be sure that either something is out of balance in your body, or soon will be, so you should seek help.

What Must You Do to Be Healthy?

If you want to achieve glowing health with energy to spare, and maintain your vitality and wellbeing well into old age, you and your health practitioner must do three things:

1. Recognise unwellness and identify just what is preventing you from healing naturally

2. Remove the obstacles to your healing that so your body can get back onto its natural healing path

3. Maintain health by supporting and strengthening your body’s natural healing and recovery processes, and protect it from harmful influences.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But even the first step can be quite a challenge.

For one thing, illness and dis-ease can arise from many different causes, and those causes are often hidden, or may seem to have nothing at all to do with your problems. Even after a diagnosis is made, it often requires great persistence, open-mindedness, and good powers of observation to finally pinpoint just what’s causing the problems.

For example, allergies and sensitivities can go unrecognized for decades of a person’s life because no one has recognized the link between symptoms such as irritability, digestive problems, or immune malfunction, and food or chemical allergies. The implications of this can be enormous.

On the other hand, it may only take the decision to find out what’s wrong to open your eyes to problems that you never noticed or just accepted as part of life or growing older, such as sudden mood swings, bloating, or aches and pains.

Start From Here…..Where is Here?

To begin the wellness journey, you must know where you are at now (experiencing symptoms of unwellness), and where you want to be (without those symptoms and feeling radiantly healthy). In other words, before you actually begin the wellness journey, you must first identify your starting point and your destination. The destination may change over time, but without a clear sense of direction and a target, you and your health practitioner might as well be shooting in the dark.

This preliminary stage can require a lot of patience. The symptoms that force you to seek professional help are often just the tail end of the development of illness, which could have been going on for years, unnoticed. People can be very astute concerning their own health, but for persistent problems, it usually takes the help of an experienced health practitioner to uncover the real, and often, multiple causes. A good practitioner will draw on the patient’s own observations and history as well as testing and other diagnostic tools.

For example, even if you already know you have allergies, you will need testing to identify exactly what substances are causing your allergic reactions. I find that many people are allergic or sensitive to more substances that they realise because many allergies are ‘hidden’. That is, the symptoms can occur many hours or even days after contact with the allergenic food, chemical or substance, so the person never associates the allergen with the symptom. Many food allergies are of this kind.

Once you know where you are now, your course of action will depend largely on your chosen destination: whether you just want to relieve your symptoms or correct the underlying causes, or also build future resistance to disease and illness, or achieve the kind of health that also prolongs youthfulness, enhances your natural beauty, and gives you loads of energy to live a full, active, joyful life.

At the Renew You Centre for Wellbeing and Longevity, we believe that you, not your health practitioner, should choose your destination. We’ll do all we can to help you get there. All we ask is that once you and your practitioner have agreed on your health goals, you take the steps needed to get you there. That takes a commitment to yourself. Aren’t you worth it?

For more information about Renew-You’s totally natural health programs and services, visit www.renewyoujourney.com or email info@rycentre.com.

To read more on allergies, visit www.freefromallergies.com

Fire in the Belly – Your Marvellous Digestive System

Dr Dzung Price — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 04:26:04 +0000

You might think that a little indigestion is not big deal. But really, the digestive process is like a furnace in your belly that provides the energy for your whole body, and keeps you going. If the fire goes out, everything comes to a standstill.

Physicians have known for thousands of years that digestion is the key to health. Ancient Chinese and Aryevedic medical writings, the teachings of the ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates, and the medieval physician Paracelsus all stress the importance of a good digestion, and that digestive problems are behind most diseases.

Click here to read the story in full

So What's the Big Deal about a Stuffy Nose?

Dr Dzung Price — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:25:37 +0000

If your child always seems to have a blocked nose, he or she probably has an allergic condition called allergic rhinitis. Not being able to breathe freely is bad enough, but there are other reasons to take chronic stuffy nose seriously.

Allergic Rhinitis is a condition where the mucous membranes of the nasal passage are inflamed, and produce a clear discharge. If you or your child only experience this seasonally, it is called hay fever. If the condition is persistent, you have chronic of perennial allergic rhinits. What causes the inflammation is histamine, a chemical released along with other inflammatory substances during an allergic reaction. These result in your symptoms: runny nose, sneezing, swollen tissues, watery eyes, congestion of the ear and throat.

Aside from the unpleasant cold-like symptoms, allergic rhinitis can cause sore throats because you may have to breathe mostly through the mouth, whicdh dries the throat tissues. Tooth decay is another consequence, for the saliva that normally helps protect your teeth is not able to do its work when you breathe through your mouth. Also, your sense of smell and taste are affected, so you may have a poor appetite, and may become deficient in nutrients. This is especially a problem with children.

Airborne allergens can trigger the production of excessive mucus, causing congestion. If there is too much mucus, the nasal passages cannot be cleared. Because of their smaller noses, small children are particularly affected by stuffy nose.

Rhinitis Usually Comes With Other Allergic Conditions

If you have allergic rhinitis, you either also have other inflammatory allergic conditions or are at high risk of developing them. The chronic inflammation of mucous membranes in allergic rhinitis is part of a widespread pattern of mucosal inflammation that affects different parts of the body. Inflammation of the bronchial tubes and gastro-intestinal tract is often part of this pattern. Therefore, your allergic rhinitis indicates a higher risk of asthma. In fact, rhinitis and asthma occur together in many allergic children, and the rhinitis tends to aggravate the bronchial inflammation of asthma. Children with rhinitis and asthma also commonly suffer from otitis media (inflammation of the middle ear, often called ‘glue ear’).
What Causes All This Inflammation?

Your nose and throat filter the air to remove any particles that can damage your lungs. Your respiratory organs are lined with mucus and millions of tiny hair-like projections that move foreign particles to the throat where you can cough them out or swallow them so they can be eliminated or destroyed. The function of mucus is to trap irritants before they get into the lungs so they can be removed. This requires a moist internal environment.

If the air is dry or your body is dehydrated (which is more common than you might think), the mucus can dry out the mucus so that it is no longer able to protect against airborne particles. Because there is not enough mucus, irritants can then come into contact with the membrane, irritating it and causing inflammation. This weakens the membrane so that particles can pass through it into the body’s fluids. The immune system may over-react to these particles, leading to the development of allergy. Other factors that can contribute to damage of the mucous membranes are poor diet, environmental toxins, and oxidative stress. Your allergic rhinitis can be triggered by any airborne allergens, such as pollen and mould spores, fungus and its spores, smoke, dust mites, animal dander, air pollution, and perfumes.

What You Can Do?

Various natural remedies can be to improve allergic rhinitis. These include homeopathic remedies, acupuncture, acupressure, and nasal irrigation.

Nasal irrigation

You can relieve the swelling and congestion of rhinitis by flushing out your nasal passage with warm salt water (sea salt). It has been shown to quickly reduce levels of histamine (the chemical causing the swelling) and remove excess mucus. Use the treatment morning and night, or as needed. Bathing in the sea in warm weather is also helpful.

To flush out your child’s nasal passage, dissolve about 1-2 teaspoons salt per quart of warm water, and use a bulb or large syringe to squirt the water towards the back (not the top) of your child’s head. You can add a teaspoon of baking soda to the solution, also. Adults can use a stronger solution. If it stings, start with a weaker solution and strengthen as you become accustomed to it. You can also sniff in the solution from a bowl, one nostril at a time; then hold your head back to allow the solution deep into the nasal passage. Try to avoid swallowing the solution, though you can safely do so.

Vapour Inhalation

This is another traditional remedy that has been shown very effective in reducing congestion and histamine levels. You can sit with your head over a bowl of steaming water with a towel over your head. Otherwise, use a vaporiser with water heated to about 41 – 43° C.

Acupuncture

Acupuncture is particularly effective in reducing symptoms of rhinitis, and in desensitizing people to allergens.
Acupressure

To releive nasal congestion, Drs. Kail et al suggest this in their book, Allergy Free. With your index fingers, press on the groove where each nostril meets the cheek, increasing the upwards pressure for a few moments. This also relieves sinus headache.

Desensitization to allergens

If you want lasting relief from allergic rhinitis, you want to re-program your brain and body so that they no longer react to the allergens that trigger this condition in you. You can find information under ‘Your Bio-Free Health Centre’ on this webpage .