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THE SUNSHINE VITAMIN WE ALL MISS IN THE WINTER

Societies through the Ages, all the way back to Ancient Egypt and probably before, knew that certain plants were useful in combating illness. 

They just never had the science to explain the reason. As recently as the nineteenth century, physicians discovered that lime and other citrous fruit, could prevent and even heal scurvy.

This was because the juice contains ascorbic acid, but back then, they didn’t understand this. 

A similar example of the same period involved an illness called beri-beri. And like the observation of scurvy amongst seamen, this was cured by observation of the predominant food of the sufferers.

Both beri-beri and scurvy are extremely easy to prevent with the right common vitamin, and both are extremely unpleasant ways to die untreated. Beri-beri causes people to look skeletal as the waste away with the inability to make collagen. 

In the Dutch colony of Indonesia, a doctor noted that the natives on a simple diet containing plenty of rice did not suffer beri-beri. But many others preferred the clean and washed white rice, the Dutch preferred. 

The difference with the Dutch, is that they could afford protein rich food like fish, poultry, beans, peas, eggs, and leafy green vegetables.  

Washed rice has had the husk removed and this is where the essential vitamin B1 is stored. A lack of B1 results a thiamine deficiency that cell metabolism and red blood cell production.

The importance of what we eat cannot be over-emphasised. We need a regular supply of thirteen different vitamins and fifteen minerals. A few of these are stored in various organs, most noticeably in the liver. 

Although it is impossible to take too many vitamins since most cannot be stored, one or two minerals can be a health problem when we have too many. The most common of these is iron. 

Iron is stored in the liver as ferritin and too much can cause hyperthyroidism. This can upset metabolism amongst other problems.

There are two vitamins that medical professionals are often keen for many older people to take. One of these is vitamin B12 that can help with cognitive ability amongst other problems.

It’s also one that vegans should certainly be considering as the greatest source of this vitamin comes from meat and dairy and does not appear in any vegetables. 

The other vitamin is one that can be obtained from direct sunlight. It only takes twenty minutes a day of direct sunlight but in British winters, this is not always possible to enjoy. 

Vitamin D3 is the supplement in question and along with B12, it is worth considering for many people over the age of sixty. 

In some countries, B12 is prescribed as standard for everyone over the age of sixty. Where I live in the East Mediterranean it is certainly recommended. On the other hand, with three hundred and twenty days a year of sunshine, there’s not much call for Vitamin D3.

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A GOOD RAPPORT WITH THE DOCTOR MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER

If you are lucky, you just might have a GP with a sense of humour. It makes appointments so much more relaxing, and stress free.

Some years ago I went for the results of some regular diabetic check. As the very first patient of the day, he surprised me by collecting me from reception instead of calling via the tannoy system. 

He explained that a new young doctor was on her first day, and he asked if I would mind if she sat in on the consultation. Of course I didn’t, and when I entered his rooms I was surprised to see she looked about fifteen years old. Just like policemen, the older you get, the younger they look.

Whilst he consulted my results on his computer monitor, we chatted about some mutual friends that were returning later in the year from work in Hong Kong. 

I said they wanted us all to meet up for a drink at Christmas that was just three months away. I also casually mentioned that I was thinking of moving abroad for work and if the health service was not so good where I was going, perhaps I should just give up all my medication. 

Well, he said, you won’t be alive to see our friends at Christmas then. I laughed, he laughed, and the poor newcomer, on her first ever live sit-in with a patient just looked horrified. 

Later, after I left, he told her that it was important to understand your patient and that not everyone should be treated the same way. 

Humour, is as much a part of health as eating well. We all know a hypochondriac or two. These are the ones that you wish you had never asked, how are you today, and they then drone on about all their problems. 

These are often foreigners, that don’t understand that when an Englishman asks the question, they don’t want to hear anything other than, I’m fine, thanks.

On another occasion, my doctor asked if I had any other problems and I said that I had a sharp pain sometimes below my stomach. He said there were various organs down there that could go wrong, but don’t worry about it. 

There are plenty of things going on just below the stomach, collectively this is known as the biliary system. It’s a series of ducts and organs that includes the liver, gall bladder, and pancreas. 

Clearly there is a great deal more in food digestion on top of the stomach and intestines. Oxysan is a supplement that helps to keep the intestines clear from obstructions like sluggish moving waste. 

Oxygen is a most essential part of digestion and a supplement like Oxysan is a colon cleanser, that delivers oxygenated magnesium oxide. 

Trillions of bacterium live in our gut. They are an essential part of the digestion process and most need oxygen as well as prebiotic food to exist upon. 

When we eat a healthy diet, we have nothing to concern ourselves with. But sadly, much of the food we eat is ultra processed produce that contains almost alien extras that need a bit more care. Oxysan does just this.

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DON’T UNDERESTIMATE A GASTROENTEROLOGIST

A friend introduced me to a hospital consultant doctor at an evening party recently. When I asked her speciality, she said she was a gastroenterologist. 

Like a number of people in my position, it seems I wasn’t the only one to think that her chosen speciality simply involved the digestive tract from mouth to backside, via the stomach, and a load of intestines. 

Having got into the spirit, and finding I was enjoying her good company, I asked why she had not chosen a more glamorous consultancy, such as open heart surgery or brain surgery, or even eye surgery. 

And like many before me, she had to correct my ignorance, and explain that her speciality meant she had to have a huge knowledge of much more than the basic parts as stated above.

The liver, pancreas, gall bladder and the whole of the biliary system were all her responsibility. Like you, I had no idea what the biliary system was until it was explained to me. 

Sometimes also called the biliary tree, this is a system of ducts and tubes that connect and work in conjunction with the liver, pancreas and gall bladder, that produces and stores a greenish, blue, liquid called bile. 

Bile is an essential part of food digestion and it’s the reason our poo is always brown. It is water, bile acids, cholesterol, bilirubin, phospholipids, and electrolytes. The body can only burn fat with this cocktail, and also process vitamins K and D.

Bile is released into the small intestine as soon as it senses food in transit. And this brings me to the other important part of a gastroenterologist’s speciality. And this is the other agent that exists in the intestines and also helps reduce food to that point where nutrients are released and enter into the blood through the intestinal wall. 

This other agent is collectively known as our microbiome. A mass of anything up to one hundred trillion bacterium and other microorganisms that inhabit us. 

Gastroenterologists need to keep up with all the research that is going on in this area. It is increasingly obvious to all, that the bacteria in our gut is strongly connected to our neuro condition. 

An unhappy balance of gut bacteria can contribute to everything from headache, depression, anxiety, and so on. Modern medicine may one day soon lead us to a situation where gut bacteria transplants are the norm. 

For many years there have been probiotic supplements such as Fivelac that work as a colon cleanser by delivering five good digestive bacteria. 

By taking a boost of good bacteria, the intestines gets a bit of a rush of activity that means it can also be thought of as a rejuvenating exercise. 

And so we come back to the beginning of this tale and remind ourselves that if we ever are introduced to a gastroenterologist, just remember the knowledge they must have to do their job properly.

[adamfinchley]

GOOD NEWS ABOUT GUT BACTERIA AND RED WINE

Almost without fail, my daily newspaper will have some article to do with food, whether it’s supermarkets or cookery tips, or some new news about our gut bacteria. 

It’s the same with television, where there seems to be a constant stream on competitive cooking competitions, or just some professional chef showing us all where we are going wrong in the kitchen. 

In most countries, and Britain is no exception, the biggest industry is the food business. It starts with farming and then onto food processing and packaging and finally the outlets of shops and supermarkets along with restaurants and delivery drivers. 

In the UK, four supermarket chains sell over sixty-five percent of all food. There is a similar number of food processing conglomerates producing eighty percent of all processed foods. 

We can go without buying clothes, newspapers, alcohol or cigarettes, but what we all need, is daily food. 

We tend to forget that we are not just feeding ourselves to stay alive, but also our one hundred trillion gut bacteria. There are so many of these microorganisms that collectively we have up to two kilos in total weight. 

It’s hard to believe that with something we cannot see, we have so many of them. And it’s also essential to remember that they are some of our best friends. There are anything up to a thousand different types, although most of the whole lot fall into four basic groups. 

Each of those groups have favourite foods. They need different nutrients that they hope to obtain from certain foods. This is the reason that fibre in the form of assorted fruit, vegetables, nuts and grain is so important. 

I was reading an article about the importance of variety in our diet and the importance of avoiding ultra processed foods that contain so much artificial rubbish. 

The article listed eight suggestions about good food and lifestyle choices, along with bad choices. To get all the nutrients our body and gut microbiome needs the simple answer is the greater the variety, the more likely we are to have a good gut.

But in the list, it mentioned the dangers of alcohol, and at that point I was about to turn the page for the cricket results. But it actually started with spirits, and in particular, gin, as being bad. 

And then it said that red wine might actually be good for the gut. At that point, I read on. 

The Victorians confused bacteria with germs and spent good money on colonic irrigation with a view to flushing them all out. 

Today there are plenty of supplements such as Oxy Powder that are far better at refreshing the colon. This and other supplements simply work as an oxygen boost in the bowel that that by helping clear the bowel, may also helps shift any static toxic waste. 

Oxy Powder helps shift constipation, relieves bloating, and provides support in the growth of those friendly bacteria. Just follow the instructions and remember to persevere for best results.

[adamfinchley]

OUR TEETH MAY LOOK BAD BUT THE STRENGTH IS THERE

When I was working and living in Turkey, I had to see a dentist for some emergency work on an extremely painful tooth problem.

It turned out to be my last remaining wisdom tooth trying to appear out of the gum, and the only way to deal with it was by extraction. 

After the procedure, the dentist and I had a chat and I learnt a couple of interesting facts. The first was that he told me that I have exceptionally strong bones because it was difficult to pull the tooth from the bone. 

It also follows that hard teeth equates to hard bones. Then he told me something about his experience with teeth in people of different nationalities. He reckons that by looking at someone’s teeth, and mainly the dental work, he could tell where they were from.

Some of the worst dental work had been performed on the British. This is particularly true with the more elderly people. And I told him that I think I knew why. 

In the years after the Second World War, for some reason there was a shortage of dentists in the UK. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the NHS tried to entice dentists from Australia and other Commonwealth countries with the promise of a nice relocation package and good salary. 

Crucially, they were offered a bonus for every filling they performed. Consequently, many became filler happy. And children had fillings they never really needed. It seems the UK also continued using an amalgam for many more years.

Amalgam is mercury mixed with solid shavings of silver, copper or tin. The mix was entirely up to the individual dentist. 

On the plus side, my Turkish dentist reckoned that British teeth of people over a certain age were strong because of milk rationing.

Free milk was given to schoolchildren in the nineteen-twenties and by the nineteen-forties, nearly ninety percent of all schoolchildren from the earliest age, were getting free milk.

This was what gave the British the edge in tooth strength. Other countries followed suit with France offering fresh yoghurt and soft cheese also on the free menu. 

There are many nutritional advantages to milk, but the most important for growing children is the strength its calcium gives to our teeth and bones. 

There are fifteen minerals and thirteen vitamins that we need almost daily, and calcium is just one. Nearly all the others are obtained from different foods, and the fresher and more natural, the better.

Ultra processed foods contain unnecessary ingredients like artificial colourings, flavouring, emulsifiers, sugar and sweeteners, are not good for our gut microbiome.  

Vitamin D3 is unique in that it can be obtained by simply standing in bright sunshine for a minimum twenty minutes a day. Given the dreary and overcast British weather, a supplement vitamin D3 is a safe and useful standby.

[adamfinchley]

THE SUNSHINE VITAMIN WE ALL NEED INCLUDING OUR CATS

The human body like so much else in nature, is one hugely complicated machine. The heart is the pump that ensures oxygenated blood, with all its recently absorbed nutrients, is constantly through veins and all those capillaries. 

The first statistic that seems impossible, is that if all our blood vessels were to be stretched out in one piece, it would be long enough to go around the equator, twice. 

That mind blowing fact I had to read and reread from a number of sources. The other fact about the heart is that in one day it will beat 100,000 times. In that one day, a total of 2,000 gallons of blood passes through.

Even this pumping in and out is not without a ridiculously complicated manoeuvrer. The heart is divided into four parts and it receives and chooses what proportion of the blood needs to go via the lungs for extra oxygenation and which oxygen rich blood goes elsewhere. 

At the same time that this is going on in the background, the lungs are breathing in 2,000 gallons of air a day. The work of the lungs is to collect oxygen. Pure oxygen is so combustible that if air consisted solely of this gas, the world would have exploded a long time ago. 

Air is only 20% oxygen and in each breath we take, we only manage to collect 5% before exhaling the rest. 

The body consists of around 37 trillion human cells in an adult of average size and weight. Outnumbering these cells are our friends the microorganisms that treat us as hosts. 

Much of this is in the form of gut bacteria and it is estimated that we each carry a couple of kilos of them. Many of them are essential in the food digestion process and are at the heart of our immune system and therefore, our DNA.

Dozens of smaller organs and glands contribute to digestion adding juices that help break down our food. The whole purpose is to extract nutrients from food, and this is why the type of food we eat is so important. 

It is generally considered that there are thirteen vitamins and fifteen minerals that our body needs. And surprisingly, it can also be said that our gut bacteria also likes these nutrients for them to flourish. 

It’s a shame that schools and parents do not seem to educate children on the importance of good eating habits. It seems our grandparents were better at this than we are today. 

Fresh greens and other vegetables, fresh fruit, pulses, nuts and protein including that traditional fresh fish on Friday, is all better than today's ultra processed supermarket offerings. 

One unusual vitamin is the one that we can absorb through our skin by having just twenty minutes minimum a day in the sunshine. If we don’t have sunshine we can always take a Vitamin D3 tablet to keep topped up.

[adamfinchley]

WE HUMANS ARE FAR BRIGHTER THAN WE THINK

Life can take us in strange directions, and I never could have guessed that during the nineteen-nineties I had a business decommissioning large computer mainframes. 

There was a time when I put in an offer to remove one of the most advanced and expensive computers of the day. There were only four of these computers in the UK and two belonged to the security services, and the other two, belonged to associated government departments. 

Four years earlier the one I put a sealed bid on, had been bought for 444 million pounds. Tongue in cheek, my offer was 444 pounds. It was accepted, as it was the highest bid. Two of the other bids were negative values as the cost of removal was thought to be greater than the scrap value. 

I was the only one to have spotted a microchip that could be sold on to a US company for fifty thousand pounds. 

The point of this story brings me back to an article about the human brain, and how brilliant it can be. The human body will always be better designed than any machine. That 444 million pound computer, is not a match for your mobile device that has more memory. And yet that is still nowhere near the miraculous power of our brain.

Just for information, that half billion pound processor was one end of the first experimental communication of some new invention called the World Wide Web. 

That grey sponge between your ears contains over one hundred billion neurons that are all interconnected by trillions of synapses. Neurons are firing constantly, day and night. Neuroscientists still don’t fully understand what is going on as we sleep and dream.

It’s sometimes difficult to believe how powerful our brain is when morons become politicians and lead others to war. Or look at how we treat other creatures that we have the gall to consider inferior to us. We have but one brain, and the octopus has nine, yet instead of treating this creature with respect, we kill and eat it. 

Nobody can explain the fact that when someone dies suddenly, the brain stem can remain active for minutes. What is it communicating with?

This organic grey matter holds many mysteries. It is becoming more obvious that the brain is constantly in communication with the gut. The health of the trillions of gut bacterium is reflected by the state of the brain. 

Good diet is becoming more obvious, and the avoidance of too much ultra processed food equally important. We have to treat our gut bacteria as our best buddies. If we treat them well with good probiotic, and prebiotic fresh foods, it will complete the process of digestion to help us absorb vital nutrients.

You can try fasting and drinking plenty of water. Or take a supplement such as Fivelac that contains a boost of good gut bacteria, but whatever you do, just remember that humans may be a couple of hundred thousand years old, but our trillions of friendly gut bacteria, are several billion years older.

[adamfinchley]

GUT MICROBIOME IS OUR OLDEST BEST FRIEND

The Earth came into existence around four and a half billion years ago. I’ve no idea how this date is arrived at, but it seems to be confirmed by various different learned sources. 

What is more difficult to understand is the beginning of life. It appears to have started with the smallest of creatures such as amoebas, bacteria and a little later with fungi. 

It’s as recent as just two to three hundred thousand years ago, that hairy primates were swinging in the tress and humans began to evolve. 

In Earth evolution time, we have therefore been about for an extremely short period. We’re also growing at the fastest rate, destroying with pollution most of the world, and perfecting methods of killing each other to a moment not too far away, when we’ll be gone from here. 

Since the very first beginning of any form of life and now, it is estimated that another million or more creatures have been and gone. We missed seeing dinosaurs by about sixty million years ago. Don’t believe those Hollywood movies of pteradactyls swooping down on cavemen. 

We share creatures that were on Earth nearly three billion years before the first dinosaur. This is our gut bacteria and some type of fungi. Between them, they are the oldest surviving form of life and have found they thrive well in our intestines. 

There are also a number of their relatives that live on the outside of the whole of our body. But the gut ones are the really interesting ones, as they are part of our DNA and immune system.

They help complete the process of food digestion and have adapted over our two or three hundred thousand years of existence, to tackle a number of simple foods. 

Through most of this timeline, we have been hunter/gatherers of wild vegetation, some seafood, and a little red meat. Our bacteria having evolved to recognise and feast itself upon this diet, has in recent decades been forced to adapt to ultra processed foods. 

This type of food is the result of eating and food becoming a vast commercial industry. Additives such as E numbers, artificial colouring, artificial flavouring, sweeteners and emulsifiers, are not natural and have changed our appearance and health.

Obesity has become commonplace, diabetes is a huge health problem that leads to cardiovascular problems, heart attacks and strokes. Colon cancer used to be a problem with older people but is now increasingly found in young people.

Perhaps children should be taught at an early age to understand the essential nutrients we need in our diet and where to find it. Our digestive tract is up to thirty feet long and half that is the small intestine. 

A regular cleanse with plenty of plain drinking water along with a supplement, such as Threelac, is a good start. Understanding the importance, and source of both prebiotic and probiotic food, helps. And avoiding junk food is best of all.

[adamfinchley]

EAT WELL FOR BETTER HEALTH

If you watch any of those old nineteen-forties and fifties black and white Hollywood movies, it seems nearly every adult is puffing on a cigarette.

In pubs and restaurants on both sides of the Atlantic, at least have the diners and drinkers would be smoking. 

In schools, during breaks, schoolboys and girls from a very early age thought it was cool to hide in the bushes or behind the bicycle shed and puff on a sneaky fag. 

During the nineteen fifties, some hospital doctors were just beginning to recognise a connection between heavy smokers and lung cancer. And despite the growing overwhelming evidence, it wasn’t till the year 2007 that smoking was finally banned in pubs and restaurants. 

By the time of the ban, the connection between cancer and respiratory and cardiovascular disease, was still being denied by certain interested parties. Strongest deniers were the manufacturers. And some senior government officials were keen to point out that the revenue from smoking was more than the cost of hospital treatment. 

In one satirical sketch on television, one supporter of smoking is quoted as saying that when smokers died young from lung cancer, they were saving the government paying out years of old age pensions. 

Today I read that one eminent professor of nutrition compares that long war against smoking, as just as important today, but this time, it’s ultra processed foods. 

The power of the tobacco lobby back in the second half of the twentieth century, is exceeded by the food industry today. Since nineteen-fifty, the population of the world has doubled from four billion to eight billion. 

And all of them need to eat. Back in nineteen-fifty, there was no such thing as a supermarket. In the UK there were a few corner shops selling a variety of foods. But every high street had their specialised family businesses such as butcher, baker, greengrocer, fishmonger, flower shop, and a few others.

Every one of those shops were independently owned and committed to sourcing fresh produce. The buying power of modern supermarkets is such that those small high street shops have all but gone. 

The power of the supermarkets along with food manufacturers has meant the arrival of long shelf life foods containing preservatives, artificial colouring, flavouring, emulsifiers and a whole load of unnatural ingredients. 

It is only quite recently that nutritionists are discovering the huge importance of our gut microbiome. And the connection between the brain is of increasing interest. 

The two plus kilos of bacteria and other microorganisms are essential components of our digestion. What all these ultra foods are doing with this, is only now becoming clear. 

Supplements like Oxy Powder may help clear compacted food waste in the intestines. But no supplements would be required if we all ignored ultra processed food and made more effort to eat healthier produce.

[adamfinchley]

DON’T FORGET OUR FRIENDS LIVING IN OUR GUT

We have come to the point where nutritionists, having worked out the perfect nutritional content of food, have developed a single product that contains all of them.

This results in a powder that consists of protein, essential fats, carbs and fibre, along with all 26 essential vitamins and minerals. 

Just add water and drink and you’ll no longer have to bother with the tedious business of cooking and sitting down to meals. 

Millions of people are trying out this new idea, and good luck to them, because I for one won’t be amongst them.

I can think of many arguments to stay away from this new way of living. The first problem with this new idea is that it takes away the social importance of sitting down with friends and family to enjoy properly cooked fresh food. 

Lockdown during Covid and children not going to school, is still revealing the psychological damage this has done. Working from home and the subsequent lack of physical connection is proving unhealthy for many that need more human companionship.

Sitting down in a restaurant or home for a meal is one of life’s social highlights. And the better the food the more enjoyable the experience. 

But my favourite argument concerns our unique gut microbiome. Our intestines are loaded with trillions of little creatures we cal bacteria. They are symbiotic friends for the most part, and they thrive on different foods.

The more people investigate the workings of our gut and brain, the more obvious it becomes that the two are so well connected that they may almost be considered as one organ. 

The two are in constant communication via a set of neurons and when one is unwell, the other is likely to suffer. 

Fresh fruit and vegetables are an essential part of a healthy diet. Many of the different types of gut bacteria thrive on this type of prebiotic and fibre filled food. Just how will our gut react to a diet of nothing other than a slushy drink is anyone’s guess, and may in the long term, prove the opposite of a healthy option. 

For those of us not on this new trend of a smoothie in place of real food, we can at least enjoy the fact that there is already one side effect recorded; it seems these people suffer excessive wind. 

A healthy diet consists of probiotic and prebiotic food. Probiotic is defined as food such as live yoghurt, kefir, blue cheese and any other food containing live good bacteria. 

Supplements such as Threelac are specially cultivated to deliver three of the good gut bacteria to our intestines. This boost will often help relieve minor gut ailments such as constipation, and that bloated feeling we all suffer of at one time or another.

I’m off now to rinse some fresh greens from the garden along with carrots and potatoes. The beef will go into the oven and in an hour or so, I will be sitting with the family enjoying a good Sunday roast.

[adamfinchley]

FIFTY GLANDS THAT CONTROL OUR BODIES

Some people are found to be diabetic at a very young age. They are likely to be type one diabetics and may need insulin jabs for the rest of their lives. But there are nine type two diabetics for every one type one sufferer.

Type two can happen at anytime in life, but the majority discover this in middle age. This type is usually controlled with tablets and not insulin. 

The reason that type one diabetics are discovered in babies is because their body does not make any insulin. Type two diabetics produce insulin in the pancreas, but for several reasons, the body doesn’t use it properly.

Insulin is just one of the fifty different hormones that are made inside our many glands. Frome top to bottom, there is a gland at the base of our brain called the hypothalamus and immediately below this, is a pea sized gland called the pituitary. 

Hormones are chemical messengers that regulate every bodily function from breathing rate to heartbeat, body temperature and sex drive. This whole endocrine system ticks away without us having to think about it, until something goes wrong.

Next down the body from the pituitary is the plum sized thyroid. This gland sits either side of our windpipe. Such is the mysterious nature of our being, that for some peculiar reason, nature has made this gland rely on a supply of iodine. 

The thyroid is a butterfly shaped gland that produces two hormones responsible for our metabolism, body temperature, heart rate and more. At anytime in life, we can get a problem with an over-productive thyroid or an under-productive state. 

Worse still, it is a fairly common source of cancer. A healthy diet that consists of much variety should enable us to get enough iodine. The richest source comes from sea related foods, such as seaweed, certain fish and squid. 

Other products containing iodine includes eggs and dairy products. Detoxadine is a readily available supplement when we are not getting enough iodine from those natural sources. 

There is a simple test that may reveal any thyroid problem. It involves a glass of water and a mirror. The exact procedure can be found on the internet. 

But if you have any worries, a doctor should be able to diagnose any problem. The doctor may ask some simple questions and physically try to feel the thyroid. A simple blood test may also reveal any problem.

The final procedure may involve a special type of scanning equipment at the local hospital.   

There are so many medical problems that can be caused by a poor release, or over production of hormones, that most hospitals have a whole department dedicated to this area of medicine. 

A professional in this field is known as an endocrinologist. And this area of medicine is more important than ever. In recent times, and probably caused by lack of exercise and good food, younger people are in increasing numbers are developing type two diabetes and other related problems.

[adamfinchley]

MINERALS AND VITAMINS WE ALL NEED TO KNOW

Not a day goes by when there isn’t some article in my daily newspaper involving health and exercise. And more specifically, there seems to be more about our gut microbiome. 

It’s remarkable to discover that most vitamins we need in our diet, were only identified in the first half of the last century.

Before then, from the time of the Ancient Egyptians and perhaps earlier in China, certain foods were recognised as good medicine. But nobody could identify the exact substance that was helping.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, a Scottish doctor in the Royal Navy, discovered the almost magical power of citrous fruit in curing and preventing scurvy. But he never lived to know that the magic ingredient was vitamin C. 

It is all within the past hundred years that the full list of vitamins and minerals required for a healthy body have been realised. There are by most definitions, thirteen vitamins and fifteen minerals.

Most of them are obtained from a combination of vegetables, fruits, grain, meats, seafood and dairy products. The obvious conclusion is that variety in our diet is the best way of ensuring we get the lot.

Unfortunately we have some problems. Vegetables that grow in the fields are not necessarily getting all the minerals from the ground in the volume they used to before industrial scale farming. 

Much research has been done here and tomatoes prove very interesting. So many older people complain that tomatoes today do not have the flavour they had in the time of their youth. 

They are right, research shows much of the earth they grow in, have just a fraction of the nutrients that were there just half a century ago. 

The news in the newspaper today, revealed that an internationally assembled group of research oncologists, have noticed an increase in cancers in younger people. By younger, they mean between the age of thirty and forty. 

In most cases, the worry is that the specific cancer where numbers are growing, is bowel cancer. 

It is early days, but many speculate that ultra-processed foods that this generation consume more than any generation before, means less fibre. Fibre helps to clean the intestines and helps feed certain essential gut bacteria. 

Supplements are not going to help poor diet, but older people often need a boost of B12 and sometimes vitamin D. NADH Rapid Energy is coenzyme type of Vitamin B3 and is useful when diet does not include a number of foods. 

This vitamin helps the process of converting food into energy and is understood to help boost dopamine, and serotonin. 

Bacteriology is a relatively new science. Just three hundred and fifty years ago nobody had seen any bacteria, as there were no microscopes. Nowadays, our understanding of bacteria and in particular the ones in our gut, is still a world of discovery.

The importance of the food we eat in relation to our gut microbiome and brain health, is the most exciting science of the day.

[adamfinchley]

THIS MAY LEAD TO THE END OF MEALTIMES

When I was at school there was one boy that was always obsessed by statistics. He was a bit like many Chinese people that have to change everything they see into a bet.

If it’s raining it is said that some Chinese are obliged to bet each other on whose raindrop will get to the bottom of the window pane first.

The boy fascinated with statistics was led into the world of probabilities as well as time and motion. In a twenty-four hour day, most of us sleep on average for eight hours, or one third of our time. 

From there, this boy worked out how long we sit on the toilet as a percentage of the day, and how long we sit and chew on food at mealtimes. 

All this came back to me when I was travelling to the office and working an eight hour day, again, another third of my twenty-four hour clock. Commuting to and from work was another ten percent of my day. 

When I realised that I was spending more time with office colleagues tan my own growing family, I decided to make some major changes. And here I am now writing this piece.

Someone recently worked out that since we know the reason we eat is to get at the essential protein, carbs, fats, fibre and twenty-six different minerals and minerals, perhaps we should cut out mealtimes, and simply swallow a slush containing all those critical ingredients.

It’s available as a powder and can just be sprinkled into a glass of water and that’s it! No more chewing through solids and sitting at table. For very busy people this is a Godsend. They can spend all their days working and making their teeth and jaws redundant. 

For those of us that enjoy sitting down to a good solid tasty meal, our digestive juices start working as soon as we get a smell or sight of food. Acid in the stomach get to work as well as the physical action of the stomach muscles working like a washing machine. 

The solids carry on through the digestive tract for around six to eight hours before the remains enters the large intestine. It remains there for the slowest part of the journey, around twenty-four hours or more. And in here, water and some more nutrients are absorbed. 

If our solid food consists of too much ultra-processed food, otherwise referred to as junk, there may be sluggish movement in the intestines. A supplement such as Oxylift should help to loosen and agitate some response. 

There may be some argument for the slush drink containing all our necessary nutrients, but the worry is that it becomes the only method of ingestion. Presumably, this would make many components of the digestion system irrelevant. 

Come to think of it, this could be the end of the kitchen. Millions of manufacturers of cookers, freezers, ovens, pots and pans, dishes and a thousand other kitchen items, would be confined to a line in history.

[adamfinchley]

FASTING IS A TREND WE GET TO DO EVERY NIGHT

There’s a bit of a craze for something called intermittent fasting. A well-known British politician has admitted that he follows this trend, that involves skipping meals, or alternatively, skipping food completely every other day.  

If the object of this is to expel food or waste from the whole digestive tract, it’s not going to happen. Food takes around thirty-seven hours to completely pass the whole route, so this practice just means empty gaps in the upper stages of the whole system. 

The truth is that most of us fast without realizing it. Fasting is defined as not eating for over ten or twelve hours, and if we have supper at six in the evening and eat nothing more till breakfast, then we will have achieved that time. 

We may not have consciously thought about this, but the word breakfast means exactly that; in other words, we break our fast. 

The whole purpose of eating is to get energy. This requires the body to get at a dozen different vitamins and a slightly fewer number of minerals. It also needs a great deal of oxygen from breathing and during digestion. 

The minerals and vitamins are available in a variety of raw fresh food, but when food is over-processed, we are unlikely to have a healthy diet providing all those nutrients. 

Most of these nutrients are absorbed into blood capillaries in the lining of the small intestines. By the time the chyme enters the large intestine most of the work has been completed. The large intestine holds onto the waste a bit longer to absorb water. 

Throughout the digestive tract from mouth to anus there live a kilo or two of bacteria. This was unknown until the invention of microscopes just three hundred and fifty years ago. And not until the most recent century has anyone understood the importance of them.

The realisation that they many of them are a vital and necessary part of the final breakdown of food to help release all those nutrients is now a new science. But this has become even more interesting with the realization that this whole gut microbiome is closely connected to our brain. 

All of us suffer now and again with minor gut problems from excess wind, bloating, constipation and a dozen other problems. Some people manage to work out that this may be a result of consistently eating over refined heavily processed junk food. 

A change of diet and something like Oxy Powder, a supplement that can help break up compacted faecal matter, often helps. 

But it’s also helpful to try and understand the powerful connection between brain and gut that is now recognised as the gut brain axis. 

This connection that is physically joined by a recently discovered vagus nerve, reveals that an ailment in one part is often reciprocated in the other. In other words, constipation may have a detrimental effect on moods, headache or depression.

[adamfinchley]

OUR FUTURE LOOKS BLEAK AS WE DON’T HELP OURSELVES

H1N1 influenza A virus and xylella fastidiosa bacteria have something in common. The former killed between fifty and one hundred people between 1918 and 1920 and was known as the Spanish Flu. 

And the latter is a bacterium that is also decimating numbers but not humans. This one is destroying olive trees in Spain and moving now across France, Italy, and Greece.

Both are examples of how a tiny microorganism can do so much damage with little our existing technology can control. There are plenty of other examples such as the medieval Black Death and a bacterium that not so long ago destroyed huge swathes of French vineyards. 

That last example resulted in importing vines from other countries to save the whole French wine industry. 

The First World War is an example of the stupidity of humankind and it resulted in around ten million soldiers killing each other with another thirty million civilians dead. 

No sooner had it ended, than the Spanish Flu began, and this killed off twice or thrice the numbers killed in that war. 

In more recent times, it was AIDS that killed many and led others to be so worried it was thought to be the beginning of the end of the World. And even more recently, COVID was equally scary. 

It is now thought that that last example was the result of humans creating a virus in a laboratory. As if natural viruses and bad bacteria was not bad enough, we now make our own. 

Humans in the form we are today, have only been around fifty to sixty thousand years. In the context of other creatures, this is an extremely short time. There are for example, sharks in the deep oceans today that are over four hundred years old and their line goes back at least two hundred million years. 

At the rate we are going, it doesn’t seem there is much future for us unless we make radical changes. The first step should be to spend more on preventative medicine and nothing on arms. 

We can’t kill all the dangerous bacteria and viruses, they’re too clever at evolving and multiplying. Antibiotics have worked brilliantly over the last hundred years or more. But our own defence system is finding ways to attack and destroy them, as well as learning faster, how to recognise them. 

In our digestive system we have trillions of microorganisms happily waiting for the food we eat, for them in turn to nibble away at. 

Our intestines offer perfect conditions for bacteria to live. Wet and warm are those conditions. They typically live three to five years, but are constantly splitting and reproducing. 

When we live on a diet of junk food that typically contains excessive amounts of sugar, salt, and added extras, our gut microbiome can be compromised and result in minor complications, from bloating to constipation and everything in between

Supplements like Threelac can help those friendly bacteria in the intestines, where those microorganisms help release the essential vitamins and minerals into our blood.

[adamfinchley]

FOOD GIANTS ARE AS BIG AS OIL AND PHARMACEUTICALS

People sometimes rightly get concerned about the powers of the big oil conglomerates and the pharmaceutical giants. Both these groups are unavoidable parts of our lives, and our income. How many of us don’t have a bathroom cabinet, or kitchen drawer full of tablets and other medication. And how many are without a gas guzzling car or gas hot water system? But there is another huge unavoidable expense in life, and this is the food we need to stay alive. For most homo sapiens over thousands of years, this meant picking wild vegetation and killing the occasional fish or small mammal. It’s reckoned that right up until fifteen thousand years ago, there were very few examples in the world of organised growing, or what we now might term as farming. Throughout the second world war, the biggest threat to Britain, according to Winston, was the threat of starvation. Britain had always relied upon imported foods and as shipping was the only way through, the U Boats were getting close to stopping the whole trade. At the end of the war, the small shops slowly began to recover. A typical day’s shopping involved a trip to the baker, the greengrocer, the fishmonger and the butcher. All these were to be found on every high street in every city, town, village and hamlet. The customer knew exactly what they were buying and more importantly, who from. If the quality was a problem to the customer, it became an even bigger problem to the shopkeeper. By the nineteen-sixties there came a big sea-change. Television, TV suppers, ready meals and supermarkets, changed eating habits and sounded the death knoll for small specialist high street shops. And since then, the small and big food manufacturers have been getting swallowed up by a handful of monstrous food conglomerates. In the USA and the rest of the developed world,five food companies share over one or two billion dollars trade each, every year. In the States alone, over two billion dollars a day is spent on groceries, and the vast majority of that is in supermarkets. In the old days of the artisan family retail shops, if we didn’t know the source of the food and ingredients, the shopkeeper would. Today, supermarkets, just like those pharma and oil companies are only interested in profits for their shareholders. Shelf life is critical and preservatives are essential. Most of the products have been refined to the point that we can safely call them, ultra-processed. It’s harder to know whether we are getting the necessary vitamins and minerals we need almost daily for good health. Just one of the essential vitamins is divided into six types and each comes from a different food. Supplements are sometimes needed to make sure we’re getting enough. NADH Rapid Energy is one that is an active form of coenzyme vitamin B3 and has the ability to boost concentration of memory and general alertness.

It can be naturally found in nuts and seeds potatoes, avocado, mushrooms and several other raw foods, but not in many ultra-processed foods.

[adamfinchley]

THE SCIENCE BEHIND A TASTY BISCUIT

One evening, many years ago, I was talking to a food scientist about his job at a research laboratory, near to where we both lived.

He told me he would telephone me next time they needed some guinea pig food tasters. This happens quite a bit so the call came just two days later. Twenty people turned up and we were all asked to sit on one side of a wall, each with our own closed hatch in front of us. The hatches all opened at the same moment and in front of us was a biscuit along with a piece of paper with numbers one to ten pre-printed on one side. We had just thirty seconds to bite some of the biscuit and then rate it on taste, texture and whether were likely to buy some in the future. The same procedure continued another twenty or thirty times. Never at any point do you see any human face to prevent any influence on you. At the end of all this, we were led into another room where we were given a cup of tea and somewhat amusingly, a selection of famous name biscuits. We also got ten pounds for our help. I remarked to my acquaintance that worked there that I thought he was a highly qualified food scientist so what was the biscuit tasting all about. He replied that they were all food boffins by day and these regular evening tastings were nothing to do with their serious day work, but were an extra income from established food manufacturers. The test was centred on just one of those biscuits we had tried but would never know which one. The test was taking place at another ten establishments around the different UK regions and would be repeated dozens of times with all the results fed into a computer. I remembered that occasion so many years ago, when I read today that some giant food manufacturers of confectionery products are in a bit of trouble with their recent use of E961. Just in case you don’t know what E961 is, it’s a newish sweetener called Neotame. It’s now in some cakes, canned fizzy drinks and chewing gum. And it is now thought to be damaging our delicate gut microbiome system. It also makes me wonder what other E numbers are capable of doing to our health. This particular new one was in fact a replacement for another that was worrying food researchers. The two of them are thousands of times sweeter than sugar and only exist because it’s obviously cheaper than natural sugar. Maybe we all need to think more carefully about eating ultra processed food. And maybe some gut care supplement such as Oxylift will help our friendly gut bacteria.

Our gut bacteria is an essential part of the whole digestive system, and thinking about the care of our intestines is even more important then face makeup.