Eat a salad every day

In a recent study from Rush University, adults who ate three servings of vegetables each day had a 40 % slower rate of cognitive decline over six years than those who avoided veggies. Adults who ate plenty of vegetables had the mental equivalent of someone five years younger.
Green leafy vegetables had the strongest effect, probably because of their high vitamin E content, according to the researchers.

Green vegetables, salads, watercress, sprouts, seaweed, sesame seeds, and berries are alkaline forming and rejuvenate your body. Make sure you add these foods to your daily diet.

An interesting fact from the book Stop Growing Older, Grow Younger, is that 96% of adults are not able to recall the last time they had a healthy green salad with their meal.

Two veggies that I eat all the time are spinach and cherry tomatoes.

Spinach has a sweet flavor and is rich in vitamin A, C, iron and calcium. My favorite is organic baby spinach which tastes great eaten raw in salads.

Cherry tomatoes are one of the most popular “vegetables” eaten by Americans. They are members of the fruit family, but are served in salads as a vegetable. They are an excellent source of vitamin C, and good sources of vitamin A. Cherry tomatoes contain lycopene, a powerful antioxidant with many excellent health benefits.

Ohio State University researchers discovered that people who ate a salad dressing that contained fat absorbed 15 times more beta-carotene and five times more lutein—both powerful antioxidants—than when they ate a salad topped with a fat-free dressing. So douse your daily salad with a little extra-virgin olive oil, raw virgin coconut oil, or add some cheese to help absorb needed nutrients.

One of the best reverse aging foods available is coconut oil. In fact, it’s twice as beneficial because it can be both eaten and applied directly to your skin as a soothing moisturizer. Coconut oil got a bad rap for many years because the coconut oil evaluated was not organic or virgin. For cooking, I use coconut oil in place of margarine, butter or shortening.

The best raw organic virgin coconut oil I have found is from Nutiva.
http://nutiva.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=23&osCsid=da5718d0a2d28a51199081b04f4d74cd

Avoiding the financial ruin of illness

We take for granted that our hard-earned money will be used to buy a home, educate our children, and give us security and a decent lifestyle when we retire. Many of us have medical insurance through the companies we work for, so we don’t worry about an occasional illness or even a chronic condition. It’s covered, for the most part, by that insurance. We assume that financial ruin or bankruptcy can only come to those people who don’t know how to budget their income or whose lifestyle greatly exceeds the money they earn.

According to a study published by the American Journal of Medicine on June 5, 2009, 62.1% of all personal bankruptcies in 2007 were in great part due to illness and the associated medical bills. The study concluded that, based on current filing rates, 2.346 million Americans will be affected by the 866,000 medical bankruptcies projected to be filed this year. This equates to one American every 15 seconds. Most of these people have health insurance, but the policies have high deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses. Many people don’t read the fine print and the details of their company provided insurance policies until they need to use that policy.

The doctors told my close friend that he needed a heart transplant, perhaps with a pig donor but, because he was diabetic, he wasn’t a good transplant candidate. They did heart surgery, removing a third of his heart tissue that had died from previous heart attacks. He also received a triple bypass operation. Two days later, in a second surgery, the doctors installed a defibrillator that would monitor his heart, store the data, and defibrillate his heart if the signals showed an erratic heartbeat.

This hospital visit and the associated surgeries and care cost $250,000. His insurance reluctantly covered most of the cost after persistent negotiation on my friend’s part. He had just undergone life-saving surgery and the insurance company was telling him they didn’t want to pay for the second surgery; that everything should have been done in one surgery. With current insurance policy coverage, he would have had to use his life savings to pay his medical bills. He would have had no money to support himself after having his life saved.

All diseases fall into four categories. The first three categories – inherited genetic disease, infectious disease, and trauma – account for only ten percent of the total cost of treating all diseases in America. The fourth category, degenerative and preventable disease, is associated with aging. Ninety percent of your healthcare dollars are spent on extraordinary care during the last two to three years of your life. This is one of my motivations, one of my reasons, for wanting and searching for optimal health. Much of the US healthcare budget is spent on the degenerative diseases of aging.

As you have read this, you probably have asked yourself, is there any way this could have been avoided? Is there any way to reduce the chance of financial ruin from a serious or extended illness?

The answer is a resounding yes. Through educating yourself about proper nutrition, supplementation, the availability of super foods, exercise, and lifestyle changes, you can choose to positively affect your health and your longevity. You can start your own personal health care reform by seldom needing the medical community and minimizing the costs associated with visits, lab tests, and pharmaceutical drugs with potential side effects that lead to more medical care and more drugs.

We can eliminate more than 50% of all diseases overnight just by slowing the aging process. We can alter this course by preventing, delaying and reversing the diseases associated with aging. Preventive healthcare is the answer. It is the next great model of healthcare for the new millennium – early detection, prevention and the reversal of age-related diseases. Conventional medical care facilities focus on treating the symptoms of disease rather than preventing its occurrence through nutrition, supplements, and exercise.

Read my book Stop Growing Older…Grow Younger. My book contains all you need to know about which nutrient-dense foods to eat, why you should eat organic, why you need to supplement (because foods are grown in nutrient depleted soils), what super foods are available, a healthy exercise regimen, and other products and therapies that will enhance your health, extend your life, and make all the years of your life years of quality, energy and vitality.